Howto: a very nice way of organizing your bash env variables and settings

So, I know you have either ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile in your installation. We all do. And many apps we use on a daily basis use those. Plus, you like your aliases, your own env variables and maybe even one or two bash functions you like to use.

That creates a problem. You have everything in a single file (or two) and you have a mess. It's hard to read, hard to organize and a single mistake renders that file useless. Well, maybe not useless, but you get the idea. It's a bad idea to have a 500-line config file, ¿no crees?

So, which solutions are there?

Easy, just npm install .... Yeah, right. Who wants more terrible TypeScript/EcmaScript code in their environment? I mean, really. And it comes in troves! Huge amounts of it everywhere! No mames, we can do better with plain old Bash.

The trick is actually much simpler. Here's how I do it:

Filename: ~/.bashrc

## Load any supplementary scripts from ~/.bashrc.d/
if [[ -d $HOME/.bashrc.d ]]; then
   for f in "$HOME"/.bashrc.d/*.bash; do
      [[ -f "$f" ]] && source "$f"
   done

   unset -v f
fi

Note

This snippet goes into your ~/.bashrc. It checks if the directory ~/.bashrc.d exists and then loops through every file ending in .bash to "source" it. This effectively evaluates those files into your current session.

Now, you can do the same for your bash profile, which is the preferred place to put things like environment variables and such.

Filename: ~/.bash_profile

## Load any supplementary scripts from ~/.bash_profile.d/
if [[ -d ~/.bash_profile.d ]]; then
   for f in ~/.bash_profile.d/*.bash; do
      [[ -f "$f" ]] && source "$f"
   done

   unset -v f
fi

This is a neat trick, if I may say so. It enables me to create independent files for different things. For example, I like my $GOPATH env variable to point to ~/Projects/go. Also, I like to add Go's bin directory to my $PATH. Easy enough, right?

But, where do I put it?

Main Differences:

~/.bashrc:: Read every time you open a new interactive terminal. Perfect for aliases and prompts.
~/.bash_profile:: Read only once upon login. Best for environment variables that should be inherited by all child processes.

Tip

If you want to be able to overwrite your $PATH entries and expect them to persist between terminals without re-logging, putting the loading logic in ~/.bashrc is the way to go.

That said, I am putting my go.bash file in ~/.bashrc.d/go.bash:

# go settings
export GOPATH=$HOME/src/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

Now, it's as easy as opening a new terminal (I set up my terminal to use a login shell) or I can just source ~/.bash_profile. In Fedora, sourcing ~/.bash_profile will source ~/.bashrc if it exists anyway. ;D

One more customization I really like:

# ~/.bash_profile.d/ls.bash
alias ls='ls --color=auto --group-directories-first'

That one makes my directories appear before the files when using ls. The --color=auto flag is just to make the default colors stay.

Conclusion

Keep your environment clean, dude. Organizing your configs in .d directories makes it much easier to manage and debug. No more messy files!

Referencias

Bash Reference Manual