# How to programmatically identify the currently active environment?
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-programmatically-identify-the-currently-active-environment/43257
**Category:** General Usage
**Tags:** package, environment
**Created:** [July 17, 2020, 7:56pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-programmatically-identify-the-currently-active-environment/43257 "2020-07-17T19:56:06Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@benninkrs](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/benninkrs)
#### Post date: [July 17, 2020, 7:56pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-programmatically-identify-the-currently-active-environment/43257/1 "2020-07-17T19:56:07Z")
When in Pkg mode, the prompt shows the name of the currently active environment. I would like to obtain this information programmatically. As far as I can tell, `Pkg` doesn’t document any way to do this.
From poking around in the source code I figured out that `Pkg.Types.Context().env.pkg.name` will return the name of the currently active package. But it doesn’t work if the environment is just the main Julia environement instead of a package.
Is there a better way to programmatically identify the currently active environment?
---
### Author:  [@dilumaluthge](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dilumaluthge)
#### Post date: [July 17, 2020, 7:58pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-programmatically-identify-the-currently-active-environment/43257/2 "2020-07-17T19:58:23Z")
Maybe try `Base.active_project()`
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### Author:  [@benninkrs](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/benninkrs)
#### Post date: [July 17, 2020, 8:15pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-programmatically-identify-the-currently-active-environment/43257/3 "2020-07-17T20:15:15Z")
That seems to work. Thanks
---
### Author:  [@bernhard](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/bernhard)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2021, 2:06pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-programmatically-identify-the-currently-active-environment/43257/4 "2021-09-17T14:06:49Z")
Can I programmatically find out if `Pkg.instantiate()` is needed?
Interestingly this can take quite some time (5 seconds) even when there is (seemingly) nothing to do.
```julia
julia> using Pkg
(RunamoLotteryModel) pkg> st
Project Rv0.1.0
Status `C:\Users\bernhard.konig\Documents\Repositories\R.jl\Project.toml`
[336ed68f] CSV v0.8.5
[1b08a953] Dash v0.1.6
[1b08a953] DashCoreComponents v1.17.1
[1b08a953] DashHtmlComponents v1.1.4
[1b08a953] DashTable v4.12.0
[a93c6f00] DataFrames v1.2.2
[31c24e10] Distributions v0.25.16
[ff294ebf] ExcelWriter v0.1.7 `https://github.com/kafisatz/ExcelWriter.jl/#master`
[0f8b85d8] JSON3 v1.9.1
[b9914132] JSONTables v1.0.1
[5078a376] LazyArrays v0.21.20
[69de0a69] Parsers v1.1.2 ⚲
[92933f4c] ProgressMeter v1.7.1
[e6cf234a] RandomNumbers v1.5.3
[295af30f] Revise v3.1.19
[2913bbd2] StatsBase v0.33.10
[3a884ed6] UnPack v1.0.2
[2a0f44e3] Base64
[ade2ca70] Dates
[8ba89e20] Distributed
[b77e0a4c] InteractiveUtils
[44cfe95a] Pkg
[9a3f8284] Random
[10745b16] Statistics
[8dfed614] Test
julia> @time Pkg.instantiate()
5.568895 seconds (6.03 M allocations: 378.258 MiB, 1.12% gc time, 20.15% compilation time)
```
---
### Author:  [@ellocco](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ellocco)
#### Post date: [November 24, 2022, 1:02pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-programmatically-identify-the-currently-active-environment/43257/5 "2022-11-24T13:02:13Z")
> [@dilumaluthge](#):
>
> Base.active\_project()
and here is my command to retrieve the current environment name:
```julia
splitpath(Base.active_project())[end-1]
```