Switching environment in the CLI should also change the value of environment variables in the current terminal

[smarie]

Currently if you use the CLI as in envswitch <my_env>, you need to restart your command terminal to see the change.

Hints on how to do this:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/171588/is-there-a-command-to-refresh-environment-variables-from-the-command-prompt-in-w
• https://github.com/chocolatey/chocolatey/blob/master/src/redirects/RefreshEnv.cmd

[jayvdb]

RefreshEnv.cmd works quite well, but unlikely to help you as you want to cause the parent process to be reset.

https://github.com/tischda/refresh does that, using the broadcast mentioned in the SO you linked to above.
https://github.com/SecsAndCyber/PathFix/blob/master/src/pathfix.py#L11 does it in Python, and there are a few other examples in Python that can be found on GitHub , e.g. https://github.com/WiggleWizard/unrealtoolkit/blob/90dbb11e78314e854ffda55ad18ecfa8bb372436/unrealtoolkit/env.py#L5, but I am not sure exactly what works for those flags - I see a lot of variation.

See also saltstack/salt#23504 (comment) and rest of the thread.

[jayvdb]

I've played around with this quite a bit over the last day for my own script, and I am pretty confident that RefreshEnv.cmd is the only way to fix this.

Maximus5/ConEmu#468 also covers some of the reasons why a terminal shouldnt automatically refresh its env vars, and it has a patch very recently uploaded ... ;-)

[smarie]

Thanks @jayvdb !

I am not sure of the final conclusion though: would there be a chance for a python process (the commandline setuptools entrypoint included in envswitch) to perform what RefreshEnv.cmd does ? If so even if it would only work on windows I would gladly accept a PR or an example code snippet.

[jayvdb]

RefreshEnv.cmd generates a temporary .cmd file and call's it. We can use python to create the generated .cmd file, but there is no way that python can call it -- that has to be done in the running cmd.exe process.

The best you could do is tell users

Please run call %TEMP%\foo.cmd to refresh your current console

But then why not include RefreshEnv.cmd and ask them to run it.

[smarie]

You are right: the best is probably to include it as a resource and ask them to run it. Thanks !

[jayvdb]

would there be a chance for a python process (the commandline setuptools entrypoint included in envswitch) to perform what RefreshEnv.cmd does ?

Ahhh, yes ... if you can get control of the contents of envswitch.cmd , it could invoke refreshenv. I havent tried to override the setuptools .cmd helper. My guess is that it wont be easy to do during setup.py, and would be very tricky to do in a wheel (but see amazon-ion/ion-python#76 (comment) and my comment below it; and also https://github.com/ninjaaron/fast-entry_points), but you could do it at startup which would then be effective for all subsequent usage.

Then you have the problem of being cross platform ... :) See chocolatey/choco#1851

[smarie]

Modifying the setuptools-generated entrypoint is a good idea ! We'll see how this goes when I have a window of time to have a look (or if someone proposes a PR).