Getting a 'source: not found' error when using source in a bash script

I'm trying to write (what I thought would be) a simple bash script that will:

1. run virtualenv to create a new environment at $1
2. activate the virtual environment
3. do some more stuff (install django, add django-admin.py to the virtualenv's path, etc.)

Step 1 works quite well, but I can't seem to activate the virtualenv. For those not familiar with virtualenv, it creates an activate file that activates the virtual environment. From the CLI, you run it using source

source $env_name/bin/activate

Where $env_name, obviously, is the name of the dir that the virtual env is installed in.

In my script, after creating the virtual environment, I store the path to the activate script like this:

activate="`pwd`/$ENV_NAME/bin/activate"

But when I call source "$activate", I get this:

/home/clawlor/bin/scripts/djangoenv: 20: source: not found

I know that $activate contains the correct path to the activate script, in fact I even test that a file is there before I call source. But source itself can't seem to find it. I've also tried running all of the steps manually in the CLI, where everything works fine.

In my research I found this script, which is similar to what I want but is also doing a lot of other things that I don't need, like storing all of the virtual environments in a ~/.virtualenv directory (or whatever is in $WORKON_HOME). But it seems to me that he is creating the path to activate, and calling source "$activate" in basically the same way I am.

Here is the script in it's entirety:

#!/bin/sh

PYTHON_PATH=~/bin/python-2.6.1/bin/python

if [ $# = 1 ]
then
    ENV_NAME="$1"
    virtualenv -p $PYTHON_PATH --no-site-packages $ENV_NAME
    activate="`pwd`/$ENV_NAME/bin/activate"

    if [ ! -f "$activate" ]
    then
        echo "ERROR: activate not found at $activate"
        return 1
    fi

    source "$activate"
else
    echo 'Usage: djangoenv ENV_NAME'
fi

DISCLAIMER: My bash script-fu is pretty weak. I'm fairly comfortable at the CLI, but there may well be some extremely stupid reason this isn't working.

Solution 1:

If you're writing a bash script, call it by name:

#!/bin/bash

/bin/sh is not guaranteed to be bash. This caused a ton of broken scripts in Ubuntu some years ago (IIRC).

The source builtin works just fine in bash; but you might as well just use dot like Norman suggested.

Solution 2:

In the POSIX standard, which /bin/sh is supposed to respect, the command is . (a single dot), not source. The source command is a csh-ism that has been pulled into bash.

Try

. $env_name/bin/activate

Or if you must have non-POSIX bash-isms in your code, use #!/bin/bash.