Small, Sharp Software Tools

Managing Your Environment

You’ve used environment variables to store data, managed processes, and created your own shortcuts to make your environment more personal, but there are a few additional tools you can use to go to the next level.

Using direnv to Manage Environment Variables

If your experiences with software development are anything like mine, you’re probably juggling a few different API keys for things. Perhaps your application uses a token to keep cookies secure or an API token for managing cloud servers. Many apps push developers to place these tokens in environment variables, but this can clog up your .bashrc files.

The direnv program lets you keep environment variables with your project. When you enter the directory, direnv sets ...