Terminal: Where is the shell start-up file?

Question

I'm following a tutorial called Starting a Django 1.4 Project the Right Way, which gives directions on how to use virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper, among other things.

There's a section that reads:

If you're using pip to install packages (and I can't see why you wouldn't), you can get both virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper by simply installing the latter.

   $ pip install virtualenvwrapper 

After it's installed, add the following lines to your shell's start-up file (.zshrc, .bashrc, .profile, etc).

   export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs    export PROJECT_HOME=$HOME/directory-you-do-development-in    source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh 

Reload your start up file (e.g. source .zshrc) and you're ready to go.

I am running Mac OSX, and don't know my way around the Terminal too well. What exactly does the author mean by shell's start-up file (.zshrc, .bashrc, .profile, etc)? Where do I find this file, so that I can add those three lines?

Also, what does he mean by reload your start up file (e.g. source .zshrc)?

I would appreciate a detailed response, specific to OSX.

Answer 1

You're probably using bash so just add these 3 lines to ~/.bash_profile:

$ cat >> ~/.bash_profile export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs export PROJECT_HOME=$HOME/directory-you-do-development-in source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh ^D 

where ^D means you type Control+D (EOF).

Then either close your terminal window and open a new one, or you can "reload" your .bash_profile like this:

$ source ~/.bash_profile 

Answer 2

If you use bash, it usually means ~/.bash_profile.

In Terminal and iTerm new shells are login shells by default, so ~/.bashrc is not read at all. If instructions written for some other platform tell you to add something to .bashrc, you often have to add it to .bash_profile instead.

If both ~/.profile and ~/.bash_profile exist, only .bash_profile is read. .profile is also read by other shells, but many of the things you'd add to .bash_profile wouldn't work with them.

From /usr/share/doc/bash/bash.html:

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable.

[...]

When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if that file exists.