When hacking up BASH scripts, I often find there are some higher level things like logging, configuration, command-line argument parsing that:

• I need every time
• Take quite some effort to get right
• Keep you from your actual work

Here's an attempt to bundle those things in a generalized way so that they are reusable as-is in most of my (and hopefully your, if not ping me) programs.

Goals

Delete-key-friendly. I propose using main.sh as a base and removing the parts you don't need, rather than introducing a ton of packages, includes, compilers, etc.

Aiming for portability, I'm targeting Bash 3 (OSX still ships with 3 for instance). If you're going to ask people to install Bash 4 first, you might as well pick a more advanced language as a dependency.

We're automatically testing bash3boilerplate and it's proven to work on:

• Linux GNU bash, version 4.2.25(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
• OSX GNU bash, version 3.2.51(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin13)

Features

• Structure
• Safe defaults (break on error, pipefail, etc)
• Configuration by environment variables
• Configuration by command-line arguments (definitions parsed from help info, so no duplication needed)
• Magic variables like __file and __dir
• Logging that supports colors and is compatible with Syslog Severity levels

Installation

There are 3 ways you can install (parts of) b3bp:

1. Just get the main template: wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kvz/bash3boilerplate/master/main.sh
2. Clone the entire project: git clone git@github.com:kvz/bash3boilerplate.git
3. As of v1.0.3, b3bp can be installed as a package.json dependency via: npm install --save bash3boilerplate

Although 3 introduces a node.js dependency, this does allow for easy version pinning and distribution in environments that already have this prerequisite. But nothing prevents you from just using curl and keep your project or build system low on external dependencies.

Changelog

master (Unreleased)

• tba

v1.2.1 (2016-02-17)

• Add Travis CI automated testing for OSX (thanks @zbeekman)

v1.2.0 (2016-02-16)

• Allow disabling colors via NO_COLOR environment variable
• Enable errexit, nounset and pipefail options at the top of the script already
• More refined colors (thanks @arathai)
• Add a changelog to the README
• Add __os magic var (limited to discovering OSX and defaulting to Linux for now)
• Add __base magic var (main, if the source script is main.sh)
• Enable long, GNU style options (thanks @zbeekman)
• Add Travis CI automated testing for Linux

v1.1.0 (2015-06-29)

• Add ALLOW_REMAINDERS configuration to templater
• Fix typo: 'debugmdoe' to 'debugmode' (thanks @jokajak)
• Use ${BASH_SOURCE[0]} for __file instead of ${0}

v1.0.3 (2014-11-02)

• Add ini_val, megamount, parse_url
• Add re-usable libraries in ./src
• Use npm as an additional distribution channel

Best practices

As of v1.0.3, b3bp adds some nice re-usable libraries in ./src. Later on we'll be using snippets inside this directory to build custom packages. In order to make the snippets in ./src more useful, we recommend these guidelines.

Library exports

It's nice to have a bash package that can be used in the terminal and also be invoked as a command line function. To achieve this the exporting of your functionality should follow this pattern:

if [ "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" != ${0} ]; then
  export -f my_script
else
  my_script "${@}"
  exit $?
fi

This allows a user to source your script or invoke as a script.

# Running as a script
$ ./my_script.sh some args --blah
# Sourcing the script
$ source my_script.sh
$ my_script some more args --blah

(taken from the bpkg project)

Todo

• Make src libs adhere to Best practices
• make build system for generating custom builds
• tests via Travis

Authors

• Kevin van Zonneveld (http://kvz.io)
• Izaak Beekman (https://izaakbeekman.com/)
• Alexander Rathai (Alexander.Rathai@gmail.com)

Sponsoring

License

Copyright (c) 2013 Kevin van Zonneveld, http://kvz.io
Licensed under MIT: http://kvz.io/licenses/LICENSE-MIT