How many hours do you need to set up all your favorite tools on a new machine? What if your colleague wants the same setup and asks you for help? Or maybe you want to change something, but you set it up a long time ago and have no idea what you need to change...
Thinking of these questions it will be nice:
- if we can have all configs in one place;
- easily reproduce our setup on a new machine;
- easily share configs with other people;
- be able to look into our config, understand what was done and be able to easily change it.
This problem bothered me for quite some time. I tried automation tools like Salt, Ansible, Nix... but all of them looks too complex and inconvenient for this task:
- they are designed for different use case - many distributed machines;
- they are slow;
- you need to learn a lot before you can use it.
No really, do I need to learn a new language to be able to install some programs and manage my configs? (Hello, Nix! 😬)
Fortunately, I recently came across a course from mighty ThePrimeagen where he suggests using plane bash to automate environment setup.
When I heard that, my first thought was "Bash? No way! I will never use this old and ugly thing"... But maybe I should give it a try if nothing else worked for me..? I tried and suprisingly it worked!
Let us be honest, bash is not the "best language" in the world. It looks weird and even scary at first. But it is simple and it is worked perfectly in this case. I was able to write config scripts for all my programs in a couple of hours.
The idea is pretty simple. Let us have one folder for all of our configurations - ~/env-setup. Inside this folder, we will have dotfiles and scripts. The dotfiles will contain all our configuration files. Each program configuration will have a separate folder, e.g. nvim, nvim-another-config, zshell, vscode, etc. Inside the scripts folder, we will have our configuration scripts, e.g. nvim.sh, zshell.sh, vscode.sh, etc. Each script will have logic related to a particular program (or set of programs).
For example, let us take a look into tmux.sh:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
. bash-utils.sh
start "tmux"
log "install tmux.."
brew install tmux
log "install tmux-plugin-manager..."
git clone https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm ~/.tmux/plugins/tpm
source="$HOME/env-setup/dotfiles/tmux/.config/tmux/tmux.conf"
dest="$HOME/.config/tmux/tmux.conf"
link_config $source $dest
finish
First, we import the bash-utils.sh which contains helper functions that we use in all scripts. start, log and finish functions print helper messages to the terminal. brew install tmux will install tmux program. Then we will install the tmux plugin manager with the git clone command. After that, we will create a link from the ~/env-setup/dotfiles/tmux folder into ~/.config/tmux. So tmux will use our configuration instead of a default one. The link_config function is "smart" enough to back up our "old" config if exists. Or remove the "old" link if it was created before.
That's it. Pretty simple, right?
In case we want to install all our favorite programs at once we can run the _setup-all_.sh script which will just run all scripts one by one.
You can find all files in the env-setup repo. It is done for MacOS, but I believe we can do the same for Linux and Windows. Please clone it and create your environment setup. 🥳
Credits
Photo by Tudor Baciu on Unsplash
Please post your thoughts, questions, and ideas in the comments, press the 💖 button, and happy hacking! 🙌🏻
Top comments (0)