For a while I've been struggling with a little itch. I'm using my company notebook for company work and for Debian related stuff. Now, whenever I switch between those two contexts, I had to manually fix the environment configuration. This is mostly related to environment variables, because tools like dch et cetera rely on some, which need to be different for the different contexts, like DEBEMAIL.
A while ago I had the idea to use directory dependent configuration for that purpose, but I never found the time and mood to actually fix my itch.
Somewhere in the meanwhile I applied a quick hack ("case $PWD in ...; do export...; esac") to my zsh configuration to ease the pain, but it still did not feel right.
For the impatient:
Below you find a way to just use whats described here. The rest of the article just contains detailed information on how to implement something like this.
The other day I were cleaning up and extending my zsh configuration and it came to my mind again. I then thought about what my requirements are and how I could solve it. First I thought about using a ready solution, like
the one in the
Grml Zsh configuration, but at that point I did not remember it (it needed a hint by a co-worker *after* I finished the first version of my solution). Then I came up with my requirements:
- Separate profile changing logic from configuration (as far as possible):I don't want to re-dive into a script logic every time I decide to change something, like adding a variable or changing it. Generally I find a declarative approach much cleaner.
- Avoid repeating myself
Basically all I do when switching profiles is to change environment variables. Usually I don't want my shell to do extraordinary things, like brewing coffee when I switch the context, so I'd like to avoid typing an "export foobar.." for every single environment variable and every single profile.
It lead to a configuration approach as a first start. When thinking about how to represent the configuration I looked into the supported data types in zsh. zsh supports arrays, which is perfect for my need. I came up with something like that:
typeset -A EMAILS ENV_DEBIAN ENV_COMPANY
EMAILS=(
"private" "foo@bar.org"
"company" "baz@foo.org"
"debian" "schoenfeld@debian.org"
)
ENV_DEBIAN=(
"DEBEMAIL" "$EMAILS[debian]"
"EMAIL" "$EMAILS[debian]"
)
ENV_COMPANY=(
"DEBEMAIL" "$EMAILS[company]"
)
The next part was selecting the right profile. In the first version I used the old case logic, but it was breaking my separate logic and configuration paradigm. Approximate at this point the co-worker lead me to the grml approach, which I borrowed an idea from:
# Configure profile mappings
zstyle ':chpwd:profiles:*company*' profile company
zstyle ':chpwd:profiles:*debian*' profile debian
and the following code to lookup profile based on $PWD:
1 function detect_env_profile
2 local profile
3 zstyle -s ":chpwd:profiles:$ PWD " profile profile profile='default'
4 profile=$ (U)profile
5 if [ "$profile" != "$ENV_PROFILE" ]; then
6 print "Switching to profile: $profile"
7 fi
8 ENV_PROFILE="$profile"
9
For an explanation: zstyle is a zsh-builtin which is used to "define and lookup styles", as the manpage says, or put different: Another way to store and lookup configuration values.
Its nice for my purpose, because it allows storing patterns instead of plain configuration values which can be compared against $PWD easily with all of the zsh globbing magic. This is basically whats done in line 3. zstyle then sets $profile to the matching zstyle configuration in the :chpwd:profiles: context or to 'default' if no matching zstyle is found.
The (almost) last part is putting it together with code to switch the profile:
1 function switch_environment_profiles
2 detect_env_profile
3 config_key="ENV_$ENV_PROFILE"
4 for key value in $ (kvP)config_key ; do
5 export $key=$value
6 done
7
The only non-obvious part in this are lines 3 and 4. Remember, the profiles were defined as ENV_PROFILE, where PROFILE is the name of the profile. We cannot know that key in advance, therefore we have to construct the right environment variable from the result of detect_env_profile. We do that in line 3 and lookup this environment variable in line 4.
The deciding aspect for that is the P-flag in the parameter expansion. It tells zsh that we do not want the value of $config_key, but instead the value of $WHATEVER_CONFIG_KEY_EXPANDS_TO.
The other flags k and v tell zsh that, from the array, we want both: keys and values. If we'd omitted those flags it would have given us the values only.
We then loop over that to configure the environment. Easy, hu?
We would be finished, if this would do anything. The code above needs to be called. Lucky for us thats pretty easy to achieve, as zsh has a hook for when a directory is changed. Making all this work is simply a matter of adding something like this:
function chpwd()
switch_environment_profiles
Now, one could say, that the solution in the grml configuration has an advantage. It allows calling arbitrary commands on profile changing, which might be useful to *unset* variables in a given profile or whatever you could think of.
Well, its a matter of three lines to extend the above code for that feature:
# Taken from grml zshrc, allow chpwd_profile_functions()
if (( $ +functions[chpwd_profile_$ENV_PROFILE] )) ; then
chpwd_profile_$ ENV_PROFILE
fi
to the end of switch_environment_profiles and now its possible to additionally add a function chpwd_profile_PROFILE which is called whenever the profile is changed to that profile.
USAGE: I have put the functions into a file which can be included into your zsh configuration, which can be found
on github.
Please see this
README and the comments in the file itself on further usage instructions.
