Activate mise in your shell

Shell activation hooks your interactive shell so that the current project's tools are on PATH and its environment variables are set each time you change directories or a prompt appears. Editors and other programs that never read your shell's startup files can use shims instead, and scripts and CI can call mise exec or mise run without either; Shims compares the three.

Add one activation line to the startup file of each shell you use, then open a new terminal. The Bash, Zsh, Fish and PowerShell snippets check for the line before appending it, so running one twice does not add a second hook. For Nushell, Xonsh and Elvish, add the lines to the file yourself.

Before you start

The activation line runs mise by name, so mise must be on PATH when the startup file runs. The mise.run installer puts mise at ~/.local/bin/mise, which is not on PATH on every system. If command -v mise prints nothing, write ~/.local/bin/mise in place of mise in the line you add. Once activated, mise adds its own directory to PATH.

Bash

activation='eval "$(mise activate bash)"'
grep -qxF "$activation" ~/.bashrc 2>/dev/null || printf '%s\n' "$activation" >> ~/.bashrc

Bash login shells, which macOS Terminal opens by default, read ~/.bash_profile and read ~/.bashrc only when the profile sources it. If your ~/.bash_profile does not, add [ -f ~/.bashrc ] && . ~/.bashrc to it.

Zsh

zshrc="${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zshrc"
activation='eval "$(mise activate zsh)"'
mkdir -p "$(dirname "$zshrc")"
grep -qxF "$activation" "$zshrc" 2>/dev/null || printf '%s\n' "$activation" >> "$zshrc"

The snippet writes to $ZDOTDIR/.zshrc when you set ZDOTDIR.

Fish

Run this in fish:

mkdir -p ~/.config/fish
set activation 'mise activate fish | source'
grep -qxF $activation ~/.config/fish/config.fish 2>/dev/null; or echo $activation >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Homebrew, and any package that installs mise's vendor_conf.d/mise-activate.fish, activates mise in fish automatically, so you can skip this step. To turn that off, set MISE_FISH_AUTO_ACTIVATE to 0:

set -Ux MISE_FISH_AUTO_ACTIVATE 0

PowerShell

$PROFILE is the profile of the current PowerShell host. This creates it if it does not exist and adds the activation line once:

if (-not (Test-Path $PROFILE)) {
    New-Item -ItemType File -Path $PROFILE -Force | Out-Null
}
$activation = '(&mise activate pwsh) | Out-String | Invoke-Expression'
if (-not (Select-String -Path $PROFILE -SimpleMatch $activation -Quiet)) {
    Add-Content $PROFILE $activation
}

Terminals, editors and PowerShell versions can each use a different profile; see PowerShell profiles.

mise updates the environment when you change directories only in PowerShell 7 and newer. Windows PowerShell 5.1 updates it at the next prompt and prints a warning at startup; set $env:MISE_PWSH_CHPWD_WARNING=0 to hide the warning.

Nushell

Nushell loads activation as a generated module. Add this to env.nu (its path is in $nu.env-path) so the module exists before config.nu is parsed:

let mise_path = $nu.default-config-dir | path join mise.nu
^mise activate nu | save $mise_path --force

Add this to config.nu (its path is in $nu.config-path):

use ($nu.default-config-dir | path join mise.nu)

Restart Nushell after saving both files. If mise is not on PATH, use its absolute path in env.nu. env.nu regenerates the module at every startup, so it follows mise upgrades.

Xonsh

Add this to ~/.xonshrc, or to the Xonsh config file you use:

execx($(mise activate xonsh))

Restart Xonsh after saving. mise sets variables such as $PATH in Xonsh's environment, which Xonsh passes to the commands it runs. It does not change Python's os.environ.

Elvish

Add this to rc.elv:

var mise: = (ns [&])
eval (mise activate elvish | slurp) &ns=$mise: &on-end={|ns| set mise: = $ns }
mise:activate

mise shell and mise deactivate change the running shell, so they need the module's mise function rather than the mise executable. Alias mise to it:

edit:add-var mise~ {|@args| mise:mise $@args }

Windows shells

PowerShell uses the PowerShell line above.

Native Windows mise can also activate Bash, Zsh and Fish inside Git Bash, MSYS2 and Cygwin: add the line for that shell to its startup file. mise detects the runtime when the line runs and writes PATH in the form that runtime expects, so do not generate the script in PowerShell and source it in another shell. See Troubleshooting for path conversion in these shells.

cmd.exe cannot be activated. Put the shims directory on your user Path instead, then open a new window:

$shims = "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\mise\shims"
$userPath = [Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable('Path', 'User')
if (($userPath -split ';') -notcontains $shims) {
  [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('Path', "$shims;$userPath", 'User')
}

Shims do not set [env] variables in the shell itself; see Shims vs PATH.

Other shells

To request support for another shell, open an idea discussion. Each integration is a small module in src/shell/ if you want to contribute one.

Shell feature support

Feature	Bash	Zsh	Fish	Nushell	Elvish	Xonsh	PowerShell
mise activate	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
mise shell and mise deactivate	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Update on directory change	Yes	Yes	Yes	At the next prompt	Yes	Yes	7 and newer
Shell aliases	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No
mise completion	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes

Elvish needs the mise alias from its section for mise shell and mise deactivate. PowerShell 5.1 and Nushell update the environment at the next prompt, not on the directory change, so cd dir; node -v on one line still uses the previous directory's tools. See Directory changes for how each shell does it.

Completions

mise completion generates completion scripts that complete mise's commands, flags, tools, versions and task names. The scripts are self-contained and do not need the separate usage CLI.

The Homebrew, Arch Linux (pacman), Ubuntu PPA and COPR (dnf) packages install bash, zsh and fish completions for you. The extrepo apt repository, the yum and zypper repository, and the mise.run installer do not.

--install writes the script where your shell looks for it. It does not edit your startup files; for zsh and PowerShell it prints a line to add once:

bash

mise completion bash --install
# writes ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/mise

zsh

mise completion zsh --install
# writes ~/.local/share/zsh/site-functions/_mise and prints the fpath line to add

fish

mise completion fish --install
# writes ~/.config/fish/completions/mise.fish

PowerShell

mise completion powershell --install
# writes ~/.config/powershell/completions/mise.ps1
# (on Windows, %LOCALAPPDATA%\PowerShell\completions\mise.ps1)
# and prints the line to add to $PROFILE

Bash loads the script through the bash-completion package, which must be installed and enabled in your shell.

To choose the location yourself, print the script with mise completion <shell> and save it. For zsh, for example:

mkdir -p ~/.zfunc
mise completion zsh > ~/.zfunc/_mise

Then add these lines to ~/.zshrc, before any existing compinit call (including one a framework makes). Leave out the second line if your ~/.zshrc already runs compinit:

~/.zshrc

fpath=(~/.zfunc $fpath)
autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

These scripts complete mise itself. For commands installed through the packslip backend, see tool completions and skills.

Verify the setup

Open a new terminal and run mise doctor:

mise doctor

It reports activated: yes when the hook is loaded. If it reports activated: no, check that the line is in the startup file this shell reads and that mise was on PATH when it ran. See Troubleshooting for other problems.