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profile.d

Your first shell

This goes from a machine with nothing installed to a shell that loads a plugin you chose. It ends at a working prompt, not at a command that printed something.

Before you start

You need bash and a home directory you can write to. The installer also needs git and curl; if they are missing it installs them through your system's package manager - dnf, yum, apt, apt-get, pacman, apk, zypper or brew, whichever it finds. It prefixes that with sudo whenever sudo exists, which is a test of the command rather than of who you are: as root on a machine that has it, the install still goes through sudo, and as an ordinary user on a machine without it, the command runs bare and fails on permissions. If you would rather it did not touch your package manager at all, install git and curl yourself first and it will skip the step entirely.

1. Install

Terminal window
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jakubro/profile.d/main/bin/install | bash
\. ~/.bashrc

The script clones profile.d into ~/.profile.d/lib, symlinks three files into your home directory, and writes an empty config. Reading the output top to bottom:

===========================================================================================
profile.d
===========================================================================================
Installing from https://github.com/jakubro/profile.d...
Linking dotfiles into home directory...
'.bashrc' -> '/home/you/.profile.d/lib/home/.bashrc'
'.bash_profile' -> '/home/you/.profile.d/lib/home/.bash_profile'
'.profile' -> '/home/you/.profile.d/lib/home/.profile'
===========================================================================================
Successfully installed
===========================================================================================
Run the following command for the changes to take effect:
  \. ~/.bashrc

If you already had a ~/.bashrc, it has not been deleted. It was renamed to ~/.bashrc.backup.<timestamp> before the symlink was made. The same applies to every file profile.d links into your home directory, now and later. See what happens to your dotfiles, which also covers how to fold the old file back in.

2. Notice that nothing else happened

This first run installed no plugins, and that is not a failure. The installer writes ~/.profiledrc as part of setting itself up, and reads it in the same run - so on a first install it reads the file it just created, which is empty:

#!/bin/bash
# https://github.com/jakubro/profile.d


PLUGINS=()

Every plugin, including the ones that ship in this project, is listed there by you. A fresh install is therefore a shell with profile.d loaded and nothing loaded into it.

3. Choose a plugin

Add one entry. pyenv is a good first pick because you can see it work in one command:

#!/bin/bash
# https://github.com/jakubro/profile.d


PLUGINS=(
  https://github.com/jakubro/profile.d-pyenv
)

The available plugins table lists the rest. An entry that looks like a URL is cloned; an entry that looks like a path is symlinked from where it already is, which is what you want while writing your own.

4. Install it

Terminal window
profile.d-install
\. ~/.bashrc

profile.d-install is an alias profile.d defines for you, so it exists only in a shell that has already loaded it - that is what the \. ~/.bashrc in step 1 was for. If the alias is not found, source ~/.bashrc and try again.

The command re-reads ~/.profiledrc, clones anything new, updates anything already there, and runs each plugin's own install script. pyenv's compiles a small helper, so this one takes a minute.

5. Confirm

Terminal window
$ pyenv --version
pyenv 2.4.7

That command works because the plugin's init hook put ~/.pyenv/bin on your PATH and ran pyenv init - not because anything was written to a startup file of yours. Nothing you own was edited. The whole of your configuration is still the six lines of ~/.profiledrc, which is a file worth committing somewhere.

Where to go next