How to automatically activate virtualenvs when cd'ing into a directory

Question

I have a bunch of projects in my ~/Documents. I work almost exclusively in python, so these are basically all python projects. Each one, e.g. ~/Documents/

Answer 1

Rather than writing a custom script you could use direnv. It's not a zsh specific solution (for that you could try zsh-autoenv), but is well-maintained and easy to use with zsh. Once you've installed it, you'd want to put eval "$(direnv hook zsh)" at the end of your .zshrc. At that point you can do:

$ source ~/.zshrc
$ cd foo
$ echo "layout python" > .envrc
direnv: error .envrc is blocked. Run `direnv allow` to approve its content.
$ direnv allow
direnv: loading .envrc
direnv: export +VIRTUAL_ENV ~PATH

Now you should be in your virtualenv. You can test by running pip freeze to see that your virtualenv specific packages are installed. To deactivate

$ cd ..
direnv: unloading