Allow user to provide path to direnv

[charlieok]

There is a bit of a chicken-egg problem in getting this extension to work: I have a system for managing environment variables (including PATH) but it's built around using direnv and .envrc files, which of course is why I'm interested in using this extension. But since the desired environment isn't loaded when VS Code starts, direnv isn't on PATH yet at that point.

To bootstrap the process of setting environment variables as desired, it'd be great if I could help the extension find direnv by providing the absolute path to the executable.

Or maybe there is another way? (e.g. does VS Code include a setting that lets you make sure a directory is included in PATH, and once it is, the extension will be able to use that?) If so, it'd be helpful to be pointed toward this in an error message or description etc.

[charlieok]

Update: I learned that VS Code does run .profile in order to set PATH how the user expects. But direnv's mechanism for setting variables is triggered by a prompt (i.e. running the components of $PROMPT_COMMAND). So with this .profile script, PATH doesn't contain $homebrew_bin_dir when the script is finished.

homebrew_bin_dir=$HOME/brew/bin
direnv_path=$homebrew_bin_dir/direnv

eval "$($direnv_path hook bash)"

I thought maybe testing for a noninteractive shell would help differentiate. But when I did that, VS Code didn't run the 'noninteractive' branch of the if statement. So apparently it runs the script with the indicators of interactive mode (the 'i' flag and a value for $PS) set.

I wound up adding this to .profile:

# Ugly hack for VS Code direnv extension
if [[ -n "${VSCODE_PID+set}" && $SHLVL -lt "2" ]]; then
	# This is being run by Visual Studio Code (and we're not in a terminal launched
	# within VS Code) so there won't be a prompt that would trigger loading env
	# vars, and homebrew_bin_dir hasn't yet been added to PATH. Add it now so
	# that the VS Code direnv extension can find direnv
	PATH=$homebrew_bin_dir:$PATH
fi

[phealy]

This is an old issue, but I thought I'd comment - if you're using VS Code remote (WSL or SSH), there's a server-env-setup file you can use to set things like this.