Environment Variables

Claude Code runs tools and shell commands on your behalf. Launched from a terminal, the CLI inherits your shell environment and everything just works. But under Claude Desktop, Claude Code is spawned from a GUI/desktop session that never sourced your interactive shell config—so if you rely on version managers like mise, asdf, or nix, the tools they install may not be on Claude’s PATH. The fix is a single setting: CLAUDE_ENV_FILE.

This post introduces a solution for automatically setting up and tearing down shell environments for PowerShell in Windows. It is proposed as a potential alternative to the bash-based tool direnv, which, while effective at loading .envrc files in the current or nearest ancestor directory, has limited compatibility with PowerShell in Windows.