My Bash configuration

Few tips I want to remember about bash configuration

Unix

Locale

This tip can prevent many issues, add this to your ~/.bashrc to specify a locale or change it accordingly.

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Auto completion

Create a ~/.bash/completion folder and copy there files npm and git-completion.bash then add these lines to your ~/.bashrc.

source ~/.bash/completion/npm
source ~/.bash/completion/git-completion.bash

Git Aware Prompt

Thanks to jimeh/git-aware-prompt you can

Display current Git branch name in your terminal prompt when in a Git working directory.

Install with the following commands

mkdir -p ~/.bash
cd ~/.bash
git clone git://github.com/jimeh/git-aware-prompt.git

Then configure it adding to your ~/.bashrc

export GITAWAREPROMPT=~/.bash/git-aware-prompt
source "${GITAWAREPROMPT}/main.sh"
export PS1="\u@\h \[$txtgrn\]\$git_branch\[$txtred\]\$git_dirty\[$txtrst\]\$ "

SSH agent

When you generate an SSH key you should use a passphrase. Using an SSH agent you can provide the required passphrase once when you start your first bash session (rather than, for example, at every git commit).

I copied the following script from GitHub documentation… now I cannot find it online.

Create a ~/.ssh/agent file

# Note: ~/.ssh/environment should not be used, as it
#       already has a different purpose in SSH.

env=~/.ssh/agent.env

# Note: Don't bother checking SSH_AGENT_PID. It's not used
#       by SSH itself, and it might even be incorrect
#       (for example, when using agent-forwarding over SSH).

agent_is_running() {
    if [ "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ]; then
        # ssh-add returns:
        #   0 = agent running, has keys
        #   1 = agent running, no keys
        #   2 = agent not running
        ssh-add -l >/dev/null 2>&1 || [ $? -eq 1 ]
    else
        false
    fi
}

agent_has_keys() {
    ssh-add -l >/dev/null 2>&1
}

agent_load_env() {
    . "$env" >/dev/null
}

agent_start() {
    (umask 077; ssh-agent >|"$env")
    . "$env" >/dev/null
}

if ! agent_is_running; then
    agent_load_env
fi

# if your keys are not stored in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or ~/.ssh/id_dsa, you'll need
# to paste the proper path after ssh-add
if ! agent_is_running; then
    agent_start
    ssh-add
elif ! agent_has_keys; then
    ssh-add
fi

unset env

Add this to your ~/.bashrc

if [ -f ~/.ssh/agent ]; then
  . ~/.ssh/agent
fi

Latest bash on Mac

Currently Mac supports zsh by default. Due to licensing (GPL3 in latest bash) probably it could be completely removed. Consider the instructions below as legacy.

Bash version provided by default on a Mac, at the time of this writing (with Mojave) is still 3.2. Let’s install latest! With brew do

brew install bash

Edit /etc/shells and add this line

/usr/local/bin/bash

For instance you can do something like

sudo echo /usr/local/bin/bash >> /etc/shells

Now set it as you default shell

chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash $USER

Now quit Terminal and re-open it! Check if all ok?

echo $BASH_VERSION