Dingus is a simple tool by and for the folks at Assemble to ease management of environment variables. Dingus supports two ways of applying environment variables (through the print and session subcommands), whichever you'd prefer is up to you. In the process of doing so, Dingus will set and increment the DINGUS_LEVEL environment variable so that it's possible to track the number of nested sessions you might be in.

Dingus is written in the Rust and is available on crates.io to build from source. It is also available as a Homebrew Tap.

brew tap davidarmstronglewis/dingus
brew install dingus

Dingus has some nice built in help messages in case you forget, but here's a quick tutorial regardless.

This file should exist at ~/.config/dingus/example_1.yaml with the following contents:

HELLO: Hello World!
MULTI_LINE: "Hello there,
How are you?"

This file should exist at ~/.config/dingus/example_2.yaml with the following contents:

HELLO: Hello, Dingus Session!

As of version 0.4.2 Dingus will search upwards, recursively, for a .dingus Yaml file if no --config file is specified. Just don't commit it to source control if you have secrets to keep.

As of version 0.4.0 it's easy to see what config files you have available. Try running dingus list or dingus ls to see options you can supply to the --config parameter of the Print and Session subcommands.

Run dingus print -c example_1. See how dingus found the example.yaml file we created, read its contents, and printed out a command? That command can be piped into source - to set those variables directly in your current shell session. Neat, huh? dingus knows what shell you're running by looking at your $SHELL variable and printing out a command for that shell's syntax. I've only tested this in the fish and bash shells, so I don't know if I've got it right for all shells (actually, I know I haven't). If this doesn't work properly for you let me know what sytax I should be using for your shell and I'll toss it in there.

The full command to apply the variables to your shell is dingus print -c example_1 | source -. Normally it's discouraged to pipe anything into source - since it can open up remote code execution vulnerabilities, but you're not doing this on a production server so it's cool (right?).

Check it out: echo $HELLO and echo $MULTI_LINE both contain the values you set in the file ~/.config/dingus/example_1.yaml.

In case you don't want to pollute your current shell session with environment variables, dingus also supports opening a new session for you. By default, dingus will use whatever command your $SHELL variable refers to and assume that's a valid shell to place you into.

Try running dingus session -c example_2. You're now in a new shell session. Try echo $HELLO. Yep, we've applied the variables from ~/.config/dingus/example_2.yaml, which are now all accessible. Also available are any variables you set before entering the Dingus session, so if just ran the example in our "Dingus Print Example" section you'll find that $MULTI_LINE is still available.

As of version 0.3.7 Dingus will also accept shell when trying to invoke this subcommand. The semantics were close enough that it made sense to alias the two.