Python virtualenv shell prompts

Photo by Gabriel Heinzer on Unsplash

A quick note so next time I’m trying to figure out how to get a useful shell prompt with my current python virtualenv indicated, I’ll know how to do it.

If you don’t know what this means, this article is not for you (yet!).

Problem

You’ve got several python codebases using different virtualenv’s.

You are activating a virtual environment and your beautiful prompt (using Starship of course) shows the following:

:~/code/python_app1 (develop) [*] via 🐍 v3.10.2 (.venv)

The .venv on the end indicates that your virtualenv is active, but which one is activated? I like to keep my virtualenv in poetry inside my code and add the directory to .gitignore which leads to all of my virtualenvs showing up as (.venv) .

Solution

Since we cannot yet pass a prompt for virtualenvs when creating initializing poetry, we can edit the .venv/pyvenv.cfg file and add the following line to it:

prompt = CHANGEME

This prompt value will get picked up by Starship when you are using the standard python prompt fragment configuration.