[reissbaker]

I don't think direnv and dotenv are really the same — dotenv manages environment variables for a program, whereas direnv manages environment variables for an interactive shell.

As an example of the difference, dotenv is useful for running programs inside Docker containers — which do not inherit your interactive shell's environment variables — whereas direnv isn't particularly useful there. Ditto for programs run via init systems like systemd or even classic SysV init. On the other hand, direnv is convenient for end-user env var config, since it's aware of your shell's working directory and updates the env vars based on it without needing to run extra commands.

[frou_dh]

In my experience, the subcommand `direnv exec ...` works just fine in non-interactive scenarios like launchd jobs. I'm not sure if it even involves a shell of any kind in that mode.