[FEATURE REQUEST] `direnv` support

I stumbled across this same problem. I've used aider which just inherits the shell that it was executed from and it works perfectly.

However I was able to make claude code eventually work. The trick is that claude seems to use your login shell, which on my system was set to zsh. Once I added the proper direnv hook it started to work as expected.

I've got a pretty complicated setup using nix + direnv together and that fixed it. Hopefully this helps anyone until proper shell inheritance is added.

I'm using nix as well- what did your fix look like? Why did it have to end up being complicated?

I've got a pretty complicated setup using nix + direnv together and that fixed it.

Claude seems to run every command in a new shell, so environment variables don't carry over between commands. I tested this with !export FOO=bar and then !echo $FOO. I'm on a mac with zsh.

My workaround was to put this in ~/.zshenv (I still have the regular hook in ~/.zshrc), it seems to work OK but it's gross and I'd like a better way:

# also need mkdir -p ~/.config/direnv
# touch ~/.config/direnv/direnv.toml
# because there is a bug that causes DIRENV_LOG_FORMAT to be ignore if the config
# file does not exist

if command -v direnv >/dev/null; then
  if [[ ! -z "$CLAUDECODE" ]]; then
    eval "$(direnv hook zsh)"
    eval "$(DIRENV_LOG_FORMAT= direnv export zsh)"  # Need to trigger "hook" manually
  fi
fi

another problem is when direnv is used in a subfolder (for example in a monorepo): Bash(cd subfolder && command-managed-by-direnv) => command-managed-by-direnv will not be found (this might be similar to #2632)

For those using bash, I needed to put the script in .bashrc

programs.bash = {
  enable = true;
  bashrcExtra = ''
    if command -v direnv >/dev/null 2>&1; then
      if [ -n "$CLAUDECODE" ]; then
        eval "$(direnv hook bash)"
        eval "$(DIRENV_LOG_FORMAT= direnv export bash)"
      fi
    fi
  '';
};

Does $SHELL env var match the type of shell you're running?
Setting SHELL helped for claude & fish+direnv+flake setup.

I wish I wrote down claude-code version. Setting $SHELL does not work anymore.

Adding specifically direnv reloading support is poor design - this could be fixed more generally by allowing a hook to modify shell commands before they are executed (eg. to add environment reloading commands, but there are also quite a few other use cases - I'd also like to eg. filter stdout/stderr).

For this particular problem, another workaround is just to quit claude and do a claude --resume (assuming you have direnv shell integration set up).

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symlinked in /etc/profile.d/claude-direnv.sh

if command -v direnv >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  if [ -n "$CLAUDECODE" ]; then
    eval "$(DIRENV_LOG_FORMAT= direnv export bash)"
  fi
fi

works well enough for me now

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