autoenv with auto cleanup

-December 26, 2015 -

I heard about kennethreitz/autoenv a long time ago. The idea of autoloading project-specific environment modifications is nice, but no auto cleanup after leaving a project was a showstopper for me.

Today, I took matters into my own hands and wrote a fresh Zsh implementation¹ with auto cleanup support. Check it out: https://github.com/zmwangx/prezto/tree/master/modules/autoenv.

As a quick promotion, let me show you two common examples.

First, inserting some local bin directory into the search path. This is easily done by a one-line .env, say,

autoenv-insert-paths bin libexec

This way $PWD/bin and $PWD/libexec are inserted to the beginning of the search path, which will persist until you leave the directory tree. That is to say, the inserted paths will still be available when you descend into subdirectories (and more specific .env's can even be stacked as you descend), but they will be purged as soon as you leave the tree. Clever, isn't it?

Secondly, exporting project-specific environment variables. The .env would look like

export HOMEBREW_DEVELOPER=not-for-the-faint-hearted
-
-autoenv-purge () unset HOMEBREW_DEVELOPER

where the body of autoenv-purge will be executed when you leave the directory tree. No more junk floating around.

Again, for more info, including detailed usage and customization instructions, please visit modules/autoenv in zmwangx/prezto.

This is not a re-implementation in the common sense. My little Zsh module is inspired by kennethreitz/autoenv and reminiscent of that older project, but I took nothing from there (in fact I didn't even read their source code). I also don't claim to support their entire feature set. For instance, kennethreitz/autoenv claims to be Foreman compatible, which includes turning on ALL_EXPORT. However, I don't think ALL_EXPORT by default is a good idea, so with my autoenv, if you want ALL_EXPORT you have to set it explicitly.↩︎