Option to use system-wide direnv

[glasserc]

The asdf-direnv plugin has two functions AFAICS:

1. Install different versions of direnv as with any other asdf plugin.
2. Add a use asdf command to direnv.

These functionalities are distinct and orthogonal. Personally, I find the second functionality very valuable (thanks for the plugin!!), but I don't especially care about the first one, because:

• direnv is rarely a direct dependency of a project I'm working on, and the different versions are not so different that I typically care which one is being used.
• Unlike most asdf plugins, which manage standalone executables, direnv is installed via a shell hook, which means that even if you use asdf to install a different version of direnv, you might have to restart your shell in order to use it.

Because installing direnv via asdf means one more thing to update and manage, I'm inclined to just install it using my operating system and manage it there. For this reason, I'd like a way to use this plugin to only provide the use asdf command. I'm not sure if this is within the scope of this plugin, so if it isn't, please feel free to close :)

Right now, what happens is that any time I enter a directory with a use asdf is that a version of direnv appears on my PATH. I think this happens use asdf loads all "current" programs, which includes the "global version" of direnv. However, this gets executed from within direnv, so it may not have any effect, or at least not the intended effect.

Therefore, in order to manage direnv myself, I'd like to not have to set a global version of direnv. There are at least these two things that rely on this global version so far:

• Finding the hook command-hook-asdf.bash relies on having a direnv version selected. This seems unfortunate since this file comes from the asdf-direnv plugin and not direnv itself.
• The related command.bash script relies on asdf to execute direnv. It would be nice if it could optionally use whatever was already in the PATH.

[vic]

After installing this plugin you let asdf know that you want to use the direnv binary installed by your system
just by having a .tool-versions file like this:

# this is my global ~/.tool-versions file
direnv system

and then just create a directory for asdf-direnv to store cached environments.

$ mkdir -p ~/.asdf/installs/direnv/system/env

If I recall correctly (at least when I implemented asdf external commands) they don't depend on any version to be installed, since they are part of the plugin itself. And as long as you have the plugin installed, the extension commands like command-hook-asdf.bash should be found by asdf.

[andrewcrook]

Can you help please.
This isn’t working for me but it is set up like yours. #83
Any ideas?

[michi-zuri]

please see my answer in #83

[glasserc]

Ah, I didn't know about system, that's super cool, thanks! I was able to follow your instructions and once I did the mkdir, everything worked perfectly. Is there maybe a way for asdf-direnv to do the mkdir on the user's behalf? (Until I did, I got some very puzzling error messages: direnv: referenced does not exist.) Otherwise I think this can be closed. Thanks again!

[comfortablynick]

This got me as well. It seems like asdf-direnv could make this directory when “system” is being used. I had to install direnv via homebrew for now on my M1 Mac.