Get your .bash_profile in order

Some time ago I picked up a simple system for keeping my bash configuration files organized and sane. It's served me well and doesn't seem widely-known so I suppose it's worth sharing.

What's the problem with bash config? Well it gets to be a mess. Once you start configuring many bits of software, and many projects, it can be rather difficult to parse through the mess of environment variables and other interventions.

Comments can help, but they're easy to overlook. A better solution is a system of organization which is self-enforcing. So what I do is banish all my config from the .bash_profile, and load it from project-specific files in the ~/.bash/ directory.

That is, my .bash_profile looks like this:

function load {
        [ -f $1 ] && . $1
}

function load_dir {
        for path in $( ls $1 ); do
                load "$1$path"
        done
}

load_dir ~/.bash/

And my ~/.bash folder looks like this:

$ ls ~/.bash/
amazon_keys.bash        git.bash                node.bash                r.bash                        rvm.bash                vote_smart.bash
bundler.bash                google.bash                mail_chimp.bash                open_congress.bash        rbenv.bash                sunlight_labs.bash        votereports.bash
campaign_monitor.bash        history.bash                mate.bash                paperlex.bash                recaptch.bash                terminal.bash                yahoo.bash
fixmta.bash                homebrew.bash                meetup.bash                postgres.bash                rpx.bash                twitter.bash

Here's a few examples from that batch:

$ cat ~/.bash/node.bash 
export NODE_PATH="/usr/local/lib/node_modules:$NODE_PATH"
$ cat ~/.bash/rbenv.bash 
export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"
$ cat ~/.bash/postgres.bash 
export PGOPTIONS='-c client_min_messages=WARNING'
$ cat ~/.bash/git.bash 
# load completion installed by homebrew
load "/usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/git-completion.bash"

All clean and tidy. And if you want to view the entirety of your config settings, you can just use:

$ cat ~/.bash/*

Files are loaded in the order that they're returned by 'ls', so if you want to override the alphabetical default ordering, you can simply prefix an order number to the files you want to load early.

In any case, I hope this helps. I'd be happy to hear any tips you have.