How to organize your bash profile

For many years, I've treated my bash profile as some alien part on my computer. Over time, I hacked together quite some aliases for often-used commands and just shoved them into this mysterious file.

I recently moved to a new computer and started migrating my data, including my shell shortcuts. Opening them in Atom to cherry-pick what I want to migrate, it dawned on me that my bash profile:

• is just code, the same I write day in day out, nothing alien or mysterious at all (a different language, though)
• is a total mess
• is badly coded

Hence, I thought, why not treat my bash profile the same way, like any other project? This includes:

• a proper structure
• documentation
• linting
• reviewing
• git

So here is what I came up with:

I created a new GitHub repository named .bashrc.d and cloned it to my home folder (after some research, I found that this folder naturally exists on some Linux distros, but not on macOS; thus, I choose this name):

cd ~/ && git clone https://github.com/swiknaba/.bashrc.d.git

the folder structure there is as follows:

.bashrc.d
│   README.md  
│
└───.github
│   └───workflows
│       │   shell_lint.yml
│   
└───src
│   └───projects
│       │   project_1.bashrc
│       │   project_2.bashrc
    │   constants.bashrc
    │   git.bashrc
    │   paths.bashrc
    │   ruby_on_rails.bashrc
    │   utilities.bashrc

Now we need to load all these files in our .bash_profile, luckily that is pretty simple:

#!/bin/bash

# https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/wiki/SC2044
shopt -s globstar nullglob
for file in ~/.bashrc.d/src/**/*.bashrc
do
  source "$file"
done

So all I have to do is copy-paste this into my new computer's bash profile, then clone my repo, and finally give all files the correct permissions:

chmod -R 700 ~/.bashrc.d
find ~/.bashrc.d/src -name '*.bashrc' | xargs chmod +x

During re-writing all my bash scripts, I realized macOS ships with Bash version 3, which seems to be due to licensing issues. I've upgraded that to Bash 5, which is very straightforward; you can use homebrew for that. Upgrading Bash gives us shiny new features and overall improvements. Looping over files became so much shorter! 🚀

Many shortcuts in my bash profile are specific to projects that I am working on, so I cannot share the repo with you. However, I can share some parts of it here, in case you are interested in cleaning up and organizing your bash profile, too!

# .github/workflows/shell_lint.yml

name: ShellLint

on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ main ]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Checks-out your repository under $GITHUB_WORKSPACE, so your job can access it
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      # Lint bash scripts
      - name: Shell Linter
        uses: azohra/shell-linter@v0.4.0
        with:
          path: "src/*.bashrc, src/**/*.bashrc"

For example, the above-mentioned src/constants.bashrc contains stuff like:

# set default terminal-editor to nano
export EDITOR=nano
VISUAL="$EDITOR"
export VISUAL
export BUNDLER_EDITOR=atom

# ignore consecutive duplicates when running `history` in bash
HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

The paths.bashrc file hosts all these export PATH=/usr/... that so many tools shove into your bash profile.

And so forth. I think you get the idea!

Now that I've moved my bash profile to GitHub, I also opened my first issue: Write tests using shUnit2. Let's see, when I find motivation for that 😄

(How) do you organize code on your machine that is solely in your hands, not peer-reviewed by anyone?