Dusty's Diverse Domain

The workon script available in virtualenvwrapper is a useful tool for switching virtual environments on the fly. However, it fails for the workflow I prefer, so I wrote my own.

I prefer to keep my virtualenvs in the same folder as whatever source code or project they apply to. Normally, I put them in a folder named venv, although sometimes I use different names, most often when I have multiple virtualenvs applying to the same source tree (e.g. venv27, venvpypy).

My directory structure therefore looks like this:

/home/dusty/code/
+ project1
| + src
| | + pkg1
| | + pkg2
| + doc
| + venv
+ project2
| + src
| + venv27
| + venvpypy
+ project3
| + venv

... and so on

The problem is, I may be anywhere in the folder tree when I want to activate a virtualenv. This means I'm doing stuff like . ../../venv/bin/activate one time and venv/bin/activate another time. Trying to remember which parent directory I want often requires several tab completions to see the directory listing. This is annoying. So I wrote a bash function to activate the optionally named virtualenv in the current directory or any parent directory.

I avoid bash whenever I can, so this may not be the prettiest bash script you've ever seen. ;-)

function v {
  # activate a virtualenv
  # usage: v
  #   activate the virtualenv named venv
  # usage: v venvname
  #   activate the virtualenv named venvname
  name=venv
  if [ $1 ] ; then
    name=$1
  fi
  olddir=$(pwd)
  quit=0
  deactivate &>/dev/null
  cwd=$(pwd)
  while [ $quit -eq 0 ]
  do
    cd $cwd
    if [ $cwd == '/' ] ; then
      quit=1
    fi
    if [ -e $name ]  ; then
      source "$name/bin/activate"
      quit=1
    fi

Put this in your ~/.bashrc. Typing v on the command line will look in the current and all parent directories for a directory named venv, and will activate that venv. Typing v [venvname] will walk the same tree looking for a directory named [venvname] to activate.

If you want to make it prettier, feel free to fork it on github.