AutoenvFish

Directory-based environments for fish shell, inspired by Kenneth Reitz's autoenv. If you miss that from your bash-using days, then miss it no longer.

What is it?

If a directory (or one of its parents) contains a .env.fish file, it will be sourced when you cd into it.

In practice, you could do whatever you like—the .env.fish file is sourced and run like any fish script. In practice, I end up using it mainly for setting project-specific environment variables for local development:

set -gx DJANGO_SECRET_KEY "s00persekr1t"
set -gx DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE "myappname.settings.local"
set -gx AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
set -gx AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"

See some more stuff about security implications below.

Installation

1. Put autoenv.fish somewhere handy. I like to put it in ~/.config/fish/autoenv.fish.
2. Source the file in your config.fish:

# load autoenv.fish
. ~/.config/fish/autoenv.fish

If you want it to take effect for your current terminal sessions, reload your config.fish by typing . path/to/your/config.fish in every terminal window. If you're using iTerm2, typing ⌘⇧I is handy for broadcasting what you type to every open terminal.

Usage

Create a .env.fish file somewhere. Fill it up with whatever valid fish script you like. It'll get sourced whenever you are in the directory, and you'll see a message telling you so.

Security Considerations

AutoenvFish won't bat an eyelash if your .env.fish includes a line like sudo rm -rf /*. Be careful what you put in your files.

One of the things which autoenv does nicely is hashing of the executed files and a warning every time it changes. I'd like to add that in a future release.