Automating Our Workstation Setup

Throughout this course, we’ve created a customized environment. We’ve installed some tools on our machine, created some directories, and wrote some configuration files. Once we get something just how we like it, we might want to keep it that way. We can create a script that’ll set things up for us. That way, when we get a new machine, we can run our script and have everything set up exactly how we want it.

Let’s create a script that does just that. We’ll install the handful of utilities we’ve installed throughout the course and create a ~/.bashrc file with some basic options. To keep this exercise short, the script won’t contain everything we’ve done, but it’ll contain enough that we’ll be able to add everything else on our own. We’ll start by creating a script to set up an Ubuntu environment, which we can test with the Ubuntu virtual machine we created. If you’re on a Mac, follow along anyway because once we’re done, we’ll alter the script so that it works on macOS.

To build this script, we’ll leverage many of the techniques we learned in this course, along with a few new ones. We’ll use some conditional statements to check exit codes from commands, we’ll install programs with the package manager, and we’ll create files with cat. We’ll also use variable expansion throughout the script, a small bit of command substitution, and a for loop to iterate over a collection of packages.

Setting up the OS

Let’s create a new file named ubuntu_setup.sh and make it executable:

touch ubuntu_setup.sh
chmod +x ubuntu_setup.sh

We start our script with the shebang line and declare a variable that holds a datestamp to use as a suffix when creating backups of files. Then, we add a call to sudo, which will cause the script to prompt for the sudo password right away:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
datestamp=$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M") 
sudo -v

We’re not using set -e this time because we’re going to trap errors ourselves.

Setting output colors

The commands in this script will generate a lot of text output. Let’s colorize information messages, error messages, and success messages so they’ll stand out from the other text.We add this code to create variables to hold the color values:

ERRORCOLOR=$(tput setaf 1) # Red
SUCCESSCOLOR=$(tput setaf 2) # Green 
INFOCOLOR=$(tput

...