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

This is my solution, which:

• checks if already at the currently active venv, and do nothing in that case
• if there is a venv folder, deactivate the active one if there is one
• activate the new venv whatever if there was an old one or not.

In my bash_aliases:

function cd() {
    builtin cd "$@"

    if [ $(dirname "$VIRTUAL_ENV") == $(pwd) ] ; then
        # Already at the active virtual env
        return
    fi

    if [[ -d ./venv ]] ; then
        if type deactivate > /dev/null 2>&1 ; then
            printf "Deactivating virtualenv %s\n" "$VIRTUAL_ENV"
            deactivate
        fi

        source ./venv/bin/activate
        printf "Setting up   virtualenv %s\n" "$VIRTUAL_ENV"
    fi
}