A useful shell function

In last week’s Ruby Weekly one of the recommended posts was about a gem called Dotenv. This gem allows you to setup the environment variables your rails application needs in order to work on your development environment.

The gem will load the environment variables from .env and .ENV files in the application folder. To do so, you will need to call the gem from your application.

The problem is that the gem is conceived to be used within ruby but environment variables are an OS thing and you may need to solve the same problem when using other platforms or languages.

Probably they have similar libraries to do it. But, you already have all the tools you need: your shell.

Exporting variables

I really like ZSH. And ZSH provides hooks to certain events you can plug functions into.

One of those hooks is chpwd. It will run a function every time you change your working directory. We can make use of it, and write a simple function that checks for .env files in the destination folder and sources it.

To do that we only need to write a little function and bind it to the chpwd hook. That code belongs in my .zshrc file and looks like this:

function set_environment() {
  env_file="$PWD/.env"
  if [ -e $env_file ]; then source $env_file; fi
}
function chpwd() { set_environment; }

I use .env files but the name doesn’t really matter.

Then I create the file and export the environment variables:

export TWITTER_KEY=''
export TWITTER_SECRET=''
export S3_KEY=''
export S3_SECRET=''
export S3_ENDPOINT='s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com'

And, as soon as you enter the directory where the .env is placed the variables will be automatically exported and available for your application to read.

There are other uses

But you can do way more than exporting environment variables: you can tailor your shell to the project you are working with.

Recently I started working on a Python project. It’s my first python project and one of my coworkers introduced me to virtualenv.

But, unlike RVM or rbenv, there is no such thing (as far as we know) like .ruby-version files. So, I used a .env file to activate the python virtual environment every time I enter the project’s folder:

source project-virtualenv/bin/activate
alias activate="source project-virtualenv/bin/activate"

I also used it to create an alias that allows me to have the opposite command to the deactivate one provided by virtualenv (just in case I deactivate the environment by hand).

As you see the possibilities are enormous. There are a lot of things you can do. Hope you find it as useful as I do!