Chisel

Apologies for not being perl enough in this post .. my working environment is key to me being able to get anything done so I figure it’s a grey area I’m allowed to wander into.

Something I’ve battled with for a long time is how best to manage my bash setup and aliases.

For far too long I’d been copying a .bashrc or .bash_aliases file onto each new box I’m working on, comment out a few parts, fix a few parts, …

As I started having accounts on more machines the lack of scalability soon bacame very apparent.

Luckily (for me) I’m more than happy to steal-and-adapt ideas that other people have already thought of.

bashrc.d/

The concept I’ve stolen is the /etc/*.d/ pattern. If you’ve seen one of these directories you won’t be too shocked by the following explanation of my setup.

The gist of my setup is to have a small snippet of code and a directory of useful (turn-offable) snippets.

The Small Code Snippet

I add the following to my .bashrc if it’s missing:

if [ -d $HOME/.bashrc.d ]; then
    for x in $HOME/.bashrc.d/* ; do
        test -f "$x" || continue
        test -x "$x" || continue
        . "$x"
    done
fi

Snippet Directory

I make sure I have a directory: $HOME/.bashrc.d/

I fill it with small scripts that cover one or two features, and chmod +x the scripts that I want to have ‘turned on’.

Here’s an example directory listing:

00.home-bin
bash-completion
common
git-aliases
git-color
git-persona
git-prompt
perl6
perlbrew
perlbrew-install
README.bashrc

Some examples

I’m sure you’re all happy with the directory listing and don’t need me to spoon-feed you bash setup commands but I’m still going to!

00.home-bin

This one has a strange name because it’s one of the few cases where order matters; some later snippets call $HOME/bin scripts.

#!bash
# add my own bin to my path
if [ -d ${HOME}/bin ]; then
    PATH=${HOME}/bin:${PATH}
fi

perlbrew

In the same vein as home-bin, I also want to use my perlbrew - if I have it.

#!bash
if [ -f $HOME/perl5/perlbrew/etc/bashrc ]; then
    source $HOME/perl5/perlbrew/etc/bashrc
fi

git-aliases

I don’t spend all of my time adding paths and environment settings, I also want to minimise the amount of times I type something like

git my-custom-thingy

and see:

git: 'my-custom-thingy' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

so I have another snippet that runs and makes sure my git aliases are all injected correctly:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [ `which git` -a ! -f $HOME/.bashrcd.gitalias.lock ]; then
    # we don't want to be running this multiple times concurrently
    date > $HOME/.bashrcd.gitalias.lock;

    # add aliases
    git config --global alias.st       status
    git config --global alias.ci       commit
    git config --global alias.br       branch
    git config --global alias.co       checkout
    # etc

    # and cleanup
    rm $HOME/.bashrcd.gitalias.lock;
fi

How does it help?

It probably looks like there’s still a lot of manual copy-paste required to install this on a new machine.

This is where git comes in!

Once you’re happy enough with your set-up:

cd $HOME/.bashrc.d/
git init
git add .
git commit -m 'Initial commit'

then add the remote of your choice and git push your hard work there.

Now a new machine setup is just:

git clone git://server/bashrcd $HOME/.bashrc.d

and adding the small code snippet to your .bashrc

I still have to manually copy something?!

No, of course not!

In your .bashrc.d/ folder create snippet.SOURCE. Paste the snippet into it. DO NOT make it executable!

Now you can do the following after your git clone:

cat $HOME/.bashrd.d/snippet.SOURCE >> $HOME/.bashrc
source $HOME/.bashrc

Where’s the git repo?

I said I had a remote repo. I’m sure you’re wondering where it is.

It’s on github … unfortunately it’s a private repo because I haven’t separated out the $employer specific setup. Sorry!