bash Configuration

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/

• macOS (Apple)
  • Reset macOS to use bash instead of zsh
  • Install macOS Commandline Utilities
  • Install brew and Other Tools
  • bash Configuration Files
  • bash Profile and .bashrc File
• Linux (Desktop, VM, or Docker)
• _other-configs/ Directory
• References

macOS (Apple)

In macOS, they've switched away from bash to zsh, but I ain't dealin' with all that, so I prefer to switch it back, and to use the latest version of bash from brew (Homebrew) for best compatibility with Linux systems (which is very relevant to contemporary Cloud-based development and deployments).

So, first, you'd have to follow these steps on how to switch back to bash, and then you can use the configuration files provided here as examples.

Note that for all of this, I also strongly prefer to use iTerm2 as a Terminal Emulator (instead of the built-in terminal App).

Reset macOS to use bash instead of zsh

You can change the shell for yourself by running this command in the terminal, and this will set a permanent change:

chsh -s /bin/bash

However, if you've installed the latest version of bash through brew, that will only set you to use the default (old) install of bash that comes with macOS, which you don't want. So you'll want to come back here and use this command after you get brew installed and install the latest version of bash:

chsh -s /opt/homebrew/bin/bash

However, that command won't work, because for safety/design reasons, the core Unix system will not allow arbitrary executables to be treated as a Shell (chsh meaning "change shell"), so you'll have to edit the /etc/shells plaintext file to make that executable available:

sudo -E vim /etc/shells

For convenience, you can copy the following code to fill in the new file contents, and here is a quick exact series of key-presses (and I mean exact!!!) to quickly paste in the new contents using vim.

New Contents for /etc/shells that has now added /opt/homebrew/bin/bash to the top of the file:

# List of acceptable shells for chpass(1).
# Ftpd will not allow users to connect who are not using
# one of these shells.

/opt/homebrew/bin/bash
/bin/bash
/bin/csh
/bin/dash
/bin/ksh
/bin/sh
/bin/tcsh
/bin/zsh

Commands to overwrite the contents of the file with the new above contents, as long as you've pressed no other keys except to copy the above text from this file:

1. ESC (Make sure you're in Command Mode)
2. g then g (Move to Start of File)
3. d (Begin Delete)
4. SHIFT + g (End Delete at End of File)
5. SHIFT + a (Enter into Append Mode)
6. CMD + v (Paste new Contents)
7. ESC (Go back to Command Mode)
8. : then w then q then ENTER (or RETURN) (Write new File changes and Quit vim)

Install macOS Commandline Utilities

There's kind of a Catch-22 with macOS, that in order to install brew, you're going to also need to install the macOS Commandline Utilities so that you can get git and curl to be available, along with gcc (GNU Compiler Collection) for building and linking any relevant binaries during the brew setup and install.

To install these tools, you may get a prompt when you go to install brew, but you can also force the install by running the command:

xcode-select --install

Install brew and Other Tools

To install brew, you can refer the to Homebrew Website to make sure this is the latest command, or copy and run this command, here:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Once that installs, you can now start installing tools from brew, and here is a list of tools for various purposes that I like to install, but you certainly should do whatever you want, as some of these may be more or less interesting than others, but I'll provide a small blurb to mention the purpose of each:

• brew install git -- Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) / Version Control Software (VCS)
• brew install bash -- GNU Bash latest version (installs to /opt/homebrew/bin/bash, so see above about using instead of default, old /bin/bash executable)
• brew install fzf -- Bash History Fuzzy-Finder (Updates functionality of CTRL+r command in terminal)
• brew install make -- GNU Make ⚠️ Note that you'll have to refer to this by the command of gmake
• brew install cmake -- CMake (a tool that provides a user alternative to GNU Make)
• brew install rust -- Rust Compiler Tools
• brew install rustup -- Rust Package Management Tools (cargo)
• brew install minikube -- Local Kubernetes Cluster Running and Management
• brew install kubectl -- Kubernetes Controls (Commandline Interface)
• brew install warrensbox/tap/tfswitch -- Terraform Version Manage (brew Cask)
• brew install nvm -- Node.js Version Manager
• brew install pyenv -- Python Version Manager
• brew install direnv -- Directory Environment Manager
• brew install rsync -- Remote File Synchronization
• brew install ack -- Patern Matching Tool
• brew install jq -- JSON Query Tools
• brew install yq -- YAML Query Tools
• brew install jless -- Interactive JSON Viewer/Navigation in the Terminal
• brew install pkgconfig -- Package Config Tool for Library and Binary Installs
• brew install gcc -- GNU Compiler Collection (C, C++, Fortran, etc. Compilers and Debuggers)
• brew install glib -- glibc for macOS

bash Configuration Files

The .bashrc.d directory provides a bunch of .bash files, which are just shell scripts using bash syntax, and have been configured this way to just show them as being different from "normal" shell scripts.

The idea here, which I found from a blog which I'll add here as a reference, is that we can iterate through this directory based-on the custom .bash file-extension, and simply parse these files in the order we discover them by calling the source command. By doing that, we can source all the files into the bash configuration, without having to put everything into one giant long file.

This should make it easier to see what configuration is setup for each utility, as needed, and allow us to add more as we go, or remove any that we don't want or need anymore.

You can see that from this snippet that you'll find in the .bashrc file:

# Source the ~/.bashrc.d directory
for custom_config_file in ~/.bashrc.d/*.bash; do
    source ${custom_config_file}
done
unset -v custom_config_file

Note that "work" being done here is the source command. Some of the text here can be put into variables to make this snippet more configurable, but I find this to be straight-forward enough, as it currently is.

The unset call is basically a "clean-up" command to make sure that this iteration variable from the for loop does not stay in scope in your environment, since this is written into the bash configuration file, and due to the chsh command that we ran to set bash as the login shell, this will be run at the start of every terminal's shell environment.

Note that you'll see some other stuff in the .bashrc file, because this method isn't foolproof.

One major caveat is that we're going to be alphabetically iterating through the .bash files based-on the current system LOCALE configuration's alphanumerical (symbolic) ordering. This means that if there's any of these configurations that need to happen before or after other configurations, you can't control that with this approach, except by enforcing some specific naming conventions in the filenames.

bash Profile and .bashrc File

In macOS, the login shell as configured by chsh being bash will actually source the ~/.bash_profile file for the current User, whose $HOME directory is equivalent to the ~/ shorthand.

But in Linux variants, like Ubuntu (Debian), you'd find that the ~/.bashrc file is actually the configuration file that gets sourced.

So, you'll see that we keep the .bash_profile file and simply configure it to source the .bashrc file.

This is, arguably, just a convenience that allows us to have a common .bashrc file across macOS and Linux environments.

Linux (Desktop, VM, or Docker)

You can use most of these configuration files with Linux, as well, and similar tools exist, but you won't have access to brew, and you may need to install some of the tools directly.

_other-configs/ Directory

See the _other-configs/README.md for details; but, this folder is meant for non-bash configurations that don't necessarily go here in the $HOME directory and are more just bash-adjacent, so I've collected them here for convenience (and so that I don't make yet another new GitHub repo 👻).

References