Setup local development environments with direnv and poetry

In this short article we are going to configure direnv to be able to use poetry smoothly.

Poetry installation

Option 1

brew install pipx
pipx ensurepath
pipx install poetry

Option 2 (The option I prefer)

If you have pyenv and zsh:

Select the Python version you want to use:

# for example
pyenv global 3.11.2

Then add the following line in your ~/.zshrc file:

eval "$(pyenv init --path)"

Finally install poetry with a simple pip install poetry

direnv configuration

Edit the global .direnvrc file located vim in your home directory and add the following code:

layout_poetry() {
  if [[ ! -f pyproject.toml ]]; then
    log_error 'No pyproject.toml found.  Use `poetry new` or `poetry init` to create one first.'
    exit 2
  fi

  local VENV=$(dirname $(poetry run which python))
  export VIRTUAL_ENV=$(echo "$VENV" | rev | cut -d'/' -f2- | rev)
  export POETRY_ACTIVE=1
  PATH_add "$VENV"
}

Now each time you have a project created with Poetry you simply need to execute the following commands:

echo "layout poetry" >> .envrc
direnv allow

That’s all folks !