`flox activate` command¶

NAME¶

flox-activate - activate environments

SYNOPSIS¶

flox [ <general-options> ] activate [ <options> ] [ – <command> [ <argument> ] ]

DESCRIPTION¶

Sets environment variables and aliases, runs hooks and adds environment bin directories to your $PATH. Can be invoked from an interactive terminal to launch a sub-shell, non-interactively to produce a series of commands to be sourced by your current $SHELL, or with a command and arguments to be invoked directly.

OPTIONS¶

General Options¶

Many flox commands wrap Nix commands of the same name, and will correspondingly pass on options and arguments directly to the underlying nix invocation. For more information on the options supported by specific Nix commands please invoke flox nix <command> help.

The following options are used specifically by flox and must be specified before the <command> argument.

-v, --verbose
Verbose mode. Invoke multiple times for increasing detail.

--debug
Debug mode. Invoke multiple times for increasing detail.

-V, --version
Print flox version.

--prefix
Print flox installation prefix / Nix store path. (flox internal use only.)

--bash-passthru
Force execution in flox-bash (flox internal use only.)

Environment Options¶

The following option is supported by environment commands:

(-e|–environment) <name>
Selects flox environment to be modified or used. If not provided then flox will fall back to using the default environment.

Activate Options¶

[ – <command> [ <argument> ] ]
Command to run in the environment. Spawns the command in a subshell that does not leak into the calling process.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES¶

$FLOX_ENV
Absolute path to the install prefix of the environment being activated.

Set by flox activate before executing shell.hook.

If multiple environments are indicated, each shell.hook will run with its associated FLOX_ENV set properly, and the activated environment will have FLOX_ENV set to the first environment indicated on the CLI.

This variable may be used to set other environment variables such as MANPATH, PKG_CONFIG_PATH, PYTHONPATH, etc so that relevant tooling will search these directories to locate files and resources from the environment.

N.B. the default shell hook for newly-created environments will source the $FLOX_ENV/etc/profile file at activation if it exists. This behavior can be viewed/modified with flox edit.

Language packs (experimental)¶

Language packs help you develop with flox the way you work, making it possible to install and use compilers, interpreters, libraries and modules in much the way you would on any other operating system.

Language packs are activated by way of $FLOX_ENV/etc/profile as described above, and the flox.etc-profiles package provides a version of this script along with “language packs” providing environment variables and hooks that support developing in a variety of languages.

Install a bundle of all language packs with the command:

flox install flox.etc-profiles

To restrict the installation to individual language packs, invoke flox edit and update the installation stanza as follows:

packages.flox.etc-profiles = {
  meta.outputsToInstall = [ "base" "common_paths" "python3" ];
};

Please note that the base and common_paths language packs are required when installing individual language packs.

EXAMPLES:¶

activate “default” flox environment only within the current shell (add to the relevant “rc” file, e.g. ~/.bashrc or ~/.zprofile)

eval "$(flox activate)"
activate “foo” and “default” flox environments in a new subshell

flox activate -e foo
invoke command using “foo” and “default” flox environments

flox activate -e foo -- cmd --cmdflag cmdflagarg cmdarg

flox activate command¶