How to display the name of the current Virtualenv?

Shell's prompt

Inside your virtualenv environment is a file, bin/activate. You can edit this file to change your prompt to whatever you want it to look like. Specifically this section of the file:

...
else
    PS1="(`basename \"$VIRTUAL_ENV\"`)$PS1"
fi
...

The variable PS1 is a special variable that controls what a shell's prompt will look like. Changing its value will change your virtualenv prompt:

PS1="(this is my prompt) "

Example

1. Create a sample environment.

   $ virtualenv tst-env
   

2. When you're using virtualenv you typically source this file.

   $ cd $HOME/tst-env
   
   $ source bin/activate
   (tst-env)[saml@grinchy tst-env]$ 
   

3. After making the above change to the variable PS1 in the bin/activate file my prompt is now this:

   $ source bin/activate
   (tst-env)
   

Here are the official instructions on how to do this.

If you're using virtualenvwrapper and zsh there are a number of zsh hooks in your ~/.virtualenvs/ directory that you can use to customize your environments. Here is a bit of info regarding these. You can force an update to PS1 that will prepend the current working virtualenv to your shell prompt by adding:

_OLD_VIRTUAL_PS1=$PS1
PS1="(`basename \"$VIRTUAL_ENV\"`) $PS1"
builtin \export PS1

to ~/.virtualenvs/postactivate. To remove the tag when you deactivate, add:

PS1=$_OLD_VIRTUAL_PS1
builtin export PS1

to ~/.virtualenvs/postdeactivate

The only (plausible) thing that should break this is resourcing ~/.zshrc while working in a virtualenv

You don't have to edit your ~/.zshrc.

Since you are working with virtualenvwrapper it's possible to add options or hooks to $WORKON_HOME/post(de)activate files.

If you want to see more details consult here.

The above link allow me to do next:

In my case $WORKON_HOME=~/Envs because I modified this path when I installed virtualenvwrapper; if you didn't you should have the folder ~/.virtualenvs.

1. Open the file postactivate located in $WORKON_HOME

2. Add these lines:

   PS1="$_OLD_VIRTUAL_PS1"
   _OLD_RPROMPT="$RPROMPT"
   RPROMPT="%{${fg_bold[white]}%}(env: %{${fg[green]}%}`basename \"$VIRTUAL_ENV\"`%{${fg_bold[white]}%})%{${reset_color}%} $RPROMPT"
   

3. Save and enjoy!

   You will obtain something like this:

4. (OPTIONAL) If you want you could edit the postdeactivate file to add this line:

   RPROMPT="$_OLD_RPROMPT"