Trey Hunner

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Switching from virtualenvwrapper to direnv, Starship, and uv

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Earlier this week I considered whether I should finally switch away from virtualenvwrapper to using local .venv managed by direnv.

I’ve never seriously used direnv, but I’ve been hearing Jeff and Hynek talk about their use of direnv for a while.

After a few days, I’ve finally stumbled into a setup that works great for me. I’d like to note the basics of this setup as well as some fancy additions that are specific to my own use case.

My old virtualenvwrapper workflow

First, I’d like to note my old workflow that I’m trying to roughly recreate:

  1. I type mkvenv3 <project_name> to create a new virtual environment for the current project directory and activate it
  2. I type workon <project_name> when I want to workon that project: this activates the correct virtual environment and changes to the project directory

The initial setup I thought of allows me to:

  1. Run echo layout python > .envrc && direnv allow to create a virtual environment for the current project and activate it
  2. Change directories into the project directory to automatically activate the virtual environment

The more complex setup I eventually settled on allows me to:

  1. Run venv <project_name> to create a virtual environment for the current project and activate it
  2. Run workon <project_name> to change directories into the project (which automatically activates the virtual environment)

The initial setup

First, I installed direnv and added this to my ~/.zshrc file:

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eval "$(direnv hook zsh)"

Then whenever I wanted to create a virtual environment for a new project I created a .envrc file in that directory, which looked like this:

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layout python

Then I ran direnv allow to allow, as direnv instructed me to, to allow the new virtual environment to be automatically created and activated.

That’s pretty much it.

Unfortunately, I did not like this initial setup.

No shell prompt?

The first problem was that the virtual environment’s prompt didn’t show up in my shell prompt. This is due to a direnv not allowing modification of the PS1 shell prompt. That means I’d need to modify my shell configuration to show the correct virtual environment name myself.

So I added this to my ~/.zshrc file to show the virtual environment name at the beginning of my prompt:

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# Add direnv-activated venv to prompt
show_virtual_env() {
  if [[ -n "$VIRTUAL_ENV_PROMPT" && -n "$DIRENV_DIR" ]]; then
    echo "($(basename $VIRTUAL_ENV_PROMPT)) "
  fi
}
PS1='$(show_virtual_env)'$PS1

Wrong virtual environment directory

The next problem was that the virtual environment was placed in .direnv/python3.12. I wanted each virtual environment to be in a .venv directory instead.

To do that, I made a .config/direnv/direnvrc file that customized the python layout:

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layout_python() {
    if [[ -d ".venv" ]]; then
        VIRTUAL_ENV="$(pwd)/.venv"
    fi

    if [[ -z $VIRTUAL_ENV || ! -d $VIRTUAL_ENV ]]; then
        log_status "No virtual environment exists. Executing \`python -m venv .venv\`."
        python -m venv .venv
        VIRTUAL_ENV="$(pwd)/.venv"
    fi

    # Activate the virtual environment
    . $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/activate
}

Loading, unloading, loading, unloading…

I also didn’t like the loading and unloading messages that showed up each time I changed directories. I removed those by clearing the DIRENV_LOG_FORMAT variable in my ~/.zshrc configuration:

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export DIRENV_LOG_FORMAT=

The more advanced setup

I don’t like it when all my virtual environment prompts show up as .venv. I want ever prompt to be the name of the actual project… which is usually the directory name.

I also really wanted to be able to type venv to create a new virtual environment, activate it, and create the .envrc file for my automatically.

Additionally, I thought it would be really handy if I could type workon <project_name> to change directories to a specific project.

I made two aliases in my ~/.zshrc configuration for all of this:

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venv() {
    local venv_name=${1:-$(basename "$PWD")}
    local projects_file="$HOME/.projects"

    # Check if .envrc already exists
    if [ -f .envrc ]; then
        echo "Error: .envrc already exists" >&2
        return 1
    fi

    # Create venv
    if ! python3 -m venv --prompt "$venv_name"; then
        echo "Error: Failed to create venv" >&2
        return 1
    fi

    # Create .envrc
    echo "layout python" > .envrc

    # Append project name and directory to projects file
    echo "${venv_name} = ${PWD}" >> $projects_file

    # Allow direnv to immediately activate the virtual environment
    direnv allow
}

workon() {
    local project_name="$1"
    local projects_file="$HOME/.projects"
    local project_dir

    # Check for projects config file
    if [[ ! -f "$projects_file" ]]; then
        echo "Error: $projects_file not found" >&2
        return 1
    fi

    # Get the project directory for the given project name
    project_dir=$(grep -E "^$project_name\s*=" "$projects_file" | sed 's/^[^=]*=\s*//')

    # Ensure a project directory was found
    if [[ -z "$project_dir" ]]; then
        echo "Error: Project '$project_name' not found in $projects_file" >&2
        return 1
    fi

    # Ensure the project directory exists
    if [[ ! -d "$project_dir" ]]; then
        echo "Error: Directory $project_dir does not exist" >&2
        return 1
    fi

    # Change directories
    cd "$project_dir"
}

Now I can type this to create a .venv virtual environment in my current directory, which has a prompt named after the current directory, activate it, and create a .envrc file which will automatically activate that virtual environment (thanks to that ~/.config/direnv/direnvrc file) whenever I change into that directory:

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$ venv

If I wanted to customized the prompt name for the virtual environment, I could do this:

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$ venv my_project

When I wanted to start working on that project later, I can either change into that directory or if I’m feeling lazy I can simply type:

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$ workon my_project

That reads from my ~/.projects file to look up the project directory to switch to.

Switching to uv

I also decided to try using uv for all of this, since it’s faster at creating virtual environments. One benefit of uv is that it tries to select the correct Python version for the project, if it sees a version noted in a pyproject.toml file.

Another benefit of using uv, is that I should also be able to update the venv to use a specific version of Python with something like --python 3.12.

Here are the updated shell aliases for the ~/.zshrc for uv:

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venv() {
    local venv_name
    local dir_name=$(basename "$PWD")

    # If there are no arguments or the last argument starts with a dash, use dir_name
    if [ $# -eq 0 ] || [[ "${!#}" == -* ]]; then
        venv_name="$dir_name"
    else
        venv_name="${!#}"
        set -- "${@:1:$#-1}"
    fi

    # Check if .envrc already exists
    if [ -f .envrc ]; then
        echo "Error: .envrc already exists" >&2
        return 1
    fi

    # Create venv using uv with all passed arguments
    if ! uv venv --seed --prompt "$@" "$venv_name"; then
        echo "Error: Failed to create venv" >&2
        return 1
    fi

    # Create .envrc
    echo "layout python" > .envrc

    # Append to ~/.projects
    echo "${venv_name} = ${PWD}" >> ~/.projects

    # Allow direnv to immediately activate the virtual environment
    direnv allow
}

Switching to starship

I also decided to try out using Starship to customize my shell this week.

I added this to my ~/.zshrc:

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eval "$(starship init zsh)"

And removed this, which is no longer needed since Starship will be managing the shell for me:

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# Add direnv-activated venv to prompt
show_virtual_env() {
  if [[ -n "$VIRTUAL_ENV_PROMPT" && -n "$DIRENV_DIR" ]]; then
    echo "($(basename $VIRTUAL_ENV_PROMPT)) "
  fi
}
PS1='$(show_virtual_env)'$PS1

I also switched my python layout for direnv to just set the $VIRTUAL_ENV variable and add the $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin directory to my PATH, since the $VIRTUAL_ENV_PROMPT variable isn’t needed for Starship to pick up the prompt:

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layout_python() {
    VIRTUAL_ENV="$(pwd)/.venv"
    PATH_add "$VIRTUAL_ENV/bin"
    export VIRTUAL_ENV
}

I also made a very boring Starship configuration in ~/.config/starship.toml:

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format = """
$python\
$directory\
$git_branch\
$git_state\
$character"""

add_newline = false

[python]
format = '([(\($virtualenv\) )]($style))'
style = "bright-black"

[directory]
style = "bright-blue"

[character]
success_symbol = "[\\$](black)"
error_symbol = "[\\$](bright-red)"
vimcmd_symbol = "[❮](green)"

[git_branch]
format = "[$symbol$branch]($style) "
style = "bright-purple"

[git_state]
format = '\([$state( $progress_current/$progress_total)]($style)\) '
style = "purple"

[cmd_duration.disabled]

I setup such a boring configuration because when I’m teaching, I don’t want my students to be confused or distracted by a prompt that has considerably more information in it than their default prompt may have.

The biggest downside of switching to Starship has been my own earworm-oriented brain. As I update my Starship configuration files, I’ve repeatedly heard David Bowie singing “I’m a Starmaaan”. 🎶

Ground control to major TOML

After all of that, I realized that I could additionally use different Starship configurations for different directories by putting a STARSHIP_CONFIG variable in specific layouts. After that realization, I made my configuration even more vanilla and made some alternative configurations in my ~/.config/direnv/direnvrc file:

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layout_python() {
    VIRTUAL_ENV="$(pwd)/.venv"

    PATH_add "$VIRTUAL_ENV/bin"
    export VIRTUAL_ENV

    export STARSHIP_CONFIG=/home/trey/.config/starship/python.toml
}

layout_git() {
    export STARSHIP_CONFIG=/home/trey/.config/starship/git.toml
}

Those other two configuration files are fancier, as I have no concern about them distracting my students since I’ll never be within those directories while teaching.

You can find those files in my dotfiles repository.

The necessary tools

So I replaced virtualenvwrapper with direnv, uv, and Starship. Though direnv is doing most of the important work here. The use of uv and Starship were just bonuses.

I am also hoping to eventually replace my pipx use with uv and once uv supports adding python3.x commands to my PATH, I may replace my use of pyenv with uv as well.

Thanks to all who participated in my Mastodon thread as I fumbled through discovering this setup.

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