Help users run CLI commands installed in their ~/.datasette-app/venv/bin folder

[simonw]

As discussed on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1435754909375164416

If I wanted my app to have a menu option for "Add a command to my $PATH" what are the best practices for implementing that, assuming macOS?

[simonw]

Based on that conversation, my ideal interface for this is one that shows the user a command they can run to e.g. add Datasette to their .zshrc, giving them the option to apply that themselves but also providing a "do this for me" button that makes the edit for them.

[simonw]

An option to add sqlite-utils would be really cool too.

[simonw]

I could add the whole of ~/.datasette-app/venv/bin to their path but I really don't want to confuse things by adding Yet Another Python to the system, which would make https://m.xkcd.com/1987/ even worse.

[simonw]

That said... helping new users learn the command-line by making it easy to install twitter-to-sqlite and other tools from https://datasette.io/tools would be VERY cool.

[simonw]

https://stackoverflow.com/a/50512416/6083 has this recipe which is interesting:

osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to activate' -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "Terminal" to keystroke "t" using command down'

[neomanic]

Looking at my own .zshrc there's not much of a standard there, and I have the following examples of different approaches:

/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/latest/bin
/Users/josh/Library/Python/3.9/bin
"/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/bin:${PATH}"
# Created by `pipx` on 2021-11-08 11:13:34
export PATH="$PATH:/Users/josh/.local/bin"

I totally get the desire to make it more approachable, but given that all you have in ~/.datasette-app/ is the venv, perhaps it's viable to make /Users/josh/Library/Application Support/Datasette/venv (or the platform-preferred equivalent for future cross-platform) the default location, then everything lives together.

~/.datasette-app could be a symlink to the above... perhaps set up by a first-run option that is on by default.

That way, it can be accessible by first-timers, but then expert users have the option to limit directory sprawl.

Certainly strange sometimes being a macOS user... ha!