Directory command history

Table of content

• Why
• How does it work
• Installation and Usage
• Warning
• Known problems
• Wish-list

Why

When making a project for the first time with a new technology (e.g framework) you may want to save the commands you used during the project setup / workflow to remember how you did it when creating the next project .

The goal is to make re-learning/ remembering experience more comfortable potentially giving confidence to start new projects more often .

This project aims to automate saving commands run inside a specific directory to an external file (no effect on the main history).

How does it work

Before each prompt, dirhistory checks if the environment variable DH_ACTIVE is set to true, if so, it logs the last executed command into a file . The file name and location can be set using the env variables DH_FILENAME and DH_LOGDIR respectively , if not found it defaults to dir_history.txt in current directory.

dirhistory relies on direnv to set the environments variables (DH_ACTIVE,DH_LOGDIR, DH_FILENAME) based on the current directory.

Installation and Usage

1. Install direnv , e.g Debian based distro sudo apt install direnv
2. download and save dirhistory.sh somewhere and note its path (e.g in home directory ~/dirhistory.sh)
3. Hook both direnv and dirhistory to your shell by appending the following lines to ~/.bashrc

# ......
eval "$(direnv hook bash)"
source ~/dirhistory.sh

4. Use direnv to set DH_ACTIVE value to true in your project folder:

$ cd ~/my-project

$ echo export DH_ACTIVE=true > .envrc

# optionally you can set DH_LOGDIR and DH_FILENAME (make sure to set both)
# $ echo export DH_LOGDIR=/home/USERNAME/mylogs >> .envrc
# $ echo export DH_FILENAME=my-project-command-history.txt >> .envrc

# finally allow direnv
$ direnv allow .

# by default dir_history.txt will be created and populated with commands whenever you enter my-project directory.

Warning

If you're version controlling your project (aka using git) , make sure to exclude dirhistory's log file (dir_history.txt) by adding it to .gitignore to avoid leaking sensitive information found in commands after uploading project to a cloud-based Git repository hosting service (github, gitlab , ..)

Known problems

• the script is late by one command , make sure to run one last dummy command for e.g ls before exiting the directory so the last meaningful command gets logged.
• if you're syncing history across multiple terminals (with export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a; history -n; ${PROMPT_COMMAND}") interactions can happen (the last command run in another terminal gets logged)

Wish-list

• fix Known problems.
• better error checking for manually set DH_LOGDIR & DH_FILENAME.
• support other shells.