Bootstrapped virtualenvs

The excellent virtualenvwrapper supports a postmkvirtualenv script to bootstrap your virtual environments. Here’s a useful implementation:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Grab project name from virtualenv name
NAME=$(basename $VIRTUAL_ENV)

# Set terminal title on postactivate
echo "title $NAME" > $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postactivate

# Change directory to root of project on postactivate. We assume the
# mkvirtualenv is being run from the root of the project. This line
# will need to edited later if not.
echo "cd $PWD" >> $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postactivate

# Run postactivate now to get the title set
source $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postactivate

This ensures that a new virtualenv has a postactivate script which:

1. Sets the terminal title to that of the virtualenv
2. Changes directory to the root of the project

By convention, such a script lives in ~/.virtualenvs/postmkvirtualenv.

Note that the title function is defined in my ~/.bashrc as:

function title() {
    echo -ne "\033]0;$1\007"
}

As someone who develops in iTerm and Terminal, automatically setting the tab titles is a useful navigation aid.

There are more tips and tricks available in the virtualenvwrapper docs.