Bind tools to a specific folder

[rsayn]

How would this feature be useful?

Hey! First of all thanks for the amazing work 🌈

I'm using pipx to manage multiple Poetry versions on my machine and it works like a charm!
However, I have to remember which version I'm using in each project and add the correct suffix to every command.

Describe the solution you'd like

I'd love to have a way to "bind" a pipx executable to one of the available suffixes when running commands in a certain folder, similar to how PyEnv does with the .python-version file and the pyenv local <python-version> command.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I'm currently solving this by defining a shell function called poetry that checks the current directory, looks for a file called .poetry-version to check the pinned version for the project, and then calls poetry@<version>.

This works kind of OK, but it's shell dependant and does not scale really well to multiple tools.

It would be amazing to have this as a baked-in functionality!

[sonianuj287]

Hi @rsayn , one way to achieve folder-specific tool binding (until pipx natively supports it) is to leverage pipx’s existing isolated environments and suffix-based installations.

For example, users can install multiple versions like pipx install poetry --suffix @1.8 and --suffix @1.9, then place a simple version file (e.g., .poetry-version) in each project directory. A small shell wrapper or direnv hook can read this file and execute the correct version using pipx run --spec poetry== or call the appropriate poetry@ binary.

This approach mimics pyenv’s “local version” behavior and keeps per-project tool versions consistent. If this feature were to be integrated directly into pipx, pipx could automatically detect a .tool-version or .pipx-version file in the current directory and resolve the corresponding environment when running a command. This would make pipx even more powerful for managing multiple tool versions across different projects.

[uranusjr]

I don’t like this. Tools like pyenv achieve this with some Bash magic that does not belong to a Python tool. I would prefer this to be done in a separate project that wraps pipx to smartly look up by suffix.