I switched to virtualenvwrapper from plain old virtualenv a while back because I found out that virtualenvwrapper has a postactivate hook I can define. Now when I do
$ workon pitz
to start my work day, I get a customized work environment exactly the way I want it. In addition to activating a virtualenv named pitz, the postactivate script changes me into the top of my pitz checkout directory and then it starts up or reattaches a screen session customized just for pitz.
Setting this up was trivially easy. Here’s what my postactivate script looks like:
$ cat ~/.virtualenvs/pitz/bin/postactivate
cd /home/matt/projects/pitz
screen -S pitz -c ~/.screenrc-pitz -d -RAnd here is that .screenrc-pitz file:
$ cat ~/.screenrc-pitz
# Matt's homemade .screenrc.
# Draw that blue and red bar across the bottom of the terminal, with the cute
# stuff like the window names and system CPU load.
hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string "%{.bW}%-w%{.rW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %H %l %{..Y} %m/%d %C%a "
# Let me scroll back a thousand lines or so.
defscrollback 1024
# terminfo and termcap for nice 256 color terminal
# allow bold colors - necessary for some reason
attrcolor b ".I"
# tell screen how to set colors. AB = background, AF=foreground
termcapinfo mlterm 'Co#256:AB=E[48;5;%dm:AF=E[38;5;%dm'
# erase background with current bg color
defbce "on"
# Automatically start up a bunch of windows.
screen -t "shell" 0 pitz-shell
screen -t "code" 1
screen -t "tests" 2
chdir docs
screen -t "docs" 3
Everything from the top down to the comment # Automatically start up a bunch of windows. just tweaks how screen works. The last part creates a bunch of named windows. In the first wiindow, it doesn’t start a bash prompt. Instead it starts up the pitz-shell.
One tiny detail that may not be obvious is that if I do $ workon pitz in one terminal, and then maybe I ssh in and rerun $ workon pitz again later, I won’t cause a second screen to start up. Instead, I’ll remote-detach the original session and reconnect to it.
In practice, all my remote servers have highly customized screen sessions already waiting for me. I just need to log in and resume them, and I have all the interesting log files, database connections, and monitoring scripts already up. For example, I know my apache log is open in a pager in window 5. Window 2 has a psql session running. Window 1 has a supervisorctl client running.
This setup shaves off precious seconds when I’m trying to figure stuff out during an emergency.
This stuff isn’t rocket science, but I hope it helps somebody out.
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