Envprobe

Envprobe (envprobe) is a shell hook tool that helps you manage your environment variables on a per-shell basis easily. It allows for doing so without requiring typing in clunky export sequences, or manually source-ing who-knows-where hand-written script files.

Audience

Envprobe is provided for power users of Unix-derivative systems, especially for software developers. If your day-to-day life on your computer does not involve juggling shell configuration, you will not find much use of this tool.

Comparison to existing tools

Envprobe was conceived to be the tool between some already existing ones that allow managing your environment.

• Scripts can be evaluated in a running shell with source. This is a cumbersome operation, as the scripts need to be maintained, especially when one is still writing the initial version.

• Shell Modules (module load) allow loading pre-installed versions of software and apply their environment configuration to the local shell. These modulefiles are to be written usually by package maintainers and are distributed with the installed tools and allow the user to dynamically load or unload the “availability” of a tool.

• direnv loads and applies the export directives (specified in the .envrc files) in the context of the current directory, and its parents.

Envprobe provides the environment variable modification experience inside the current shell, with no need of manually writing configuration files. You can change your environments on the fly and if the setup works, Envprobe can save the configuration for you, and load it later.

Documentation

• Install
  • Obtaining Envprobe
    • From GitHub
  • Setting up the shell hook
    • Bash
    • Zsh
      • Stock Zsh
      • Zsh with Oh-My-Zsh
  • Testing the hook
  • Officially supported configuration
• Quick overview
• Environment variable management (main mode)
  • Managing environment variables
    • Reading (get, ?)
    • Writing (set, !, =)
    • Undefining (undefine, ^)
    • Adding to arrays (add, +)
    • Removing from arrays (remove, -)
  • Saved snapshots
    • Difference of current environment (diff, %)
    • Save the values/changes to a snapshot (save, })
    • Load a snapshot (load, {)
    • List snapshots (list)
    • Delete a snapshot (delete)
    • Variable tracking
• Settings and configuration (config mode)
  • Generating the hook (hook)
    • Obtaining the control commands (consume)
  • Setting additional information for variables (set)
  • Changing the tracking status of variables (track)
  • Interface with the community descriptions database (descriptions)
    • Update the community descriptions database (update)
• Type-safe access
• Variable Descriptions Knowledge Base
  • Installing or updating
  • Contribute to the project
• Implementation reference
  • Shell interface
    • Dynamic loading
      • Registering implementations
  • Environment variable types
    • Implemented types
      • envprobe.vartypes.string.String
      • envprobe.vartypes.numeric.Numeric
      • envprobe.vartypes.array.Array
      • envprobe.vartypes.colon_separated.ColonSeparatedArray
      • envprobe.vartypes.semi_separated.SemicolonSeparatedArray
      • envprobe.vartypes.path.Path
    • Dynamic loading
      • Registering implementations
  • Environment management
    • Difference of environments
    • Type heuristics
      • Available heuristics
  • Handling user configuration
    • Snapshot configuration
    • Storing additional information about variables
    • Tracking variables
    • Abstract configuration files
  • Community descriptions
    • Local storage
    • Downloader
    • Layout of the knowledge-base repository
      • format.ver
      • Data files (something.csv)
  • Miscellaneous functions

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page