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d-centralize handbook

Shell

What shell

If you’re building a very simple shell script, use the most compatible shell: sh. If you need a bit more power, use bash. Some developers often use more fancy shells, but for the sake of simplicity, please stick with bash. We don’t want to force all developers in a project to learn this years fancy shell. If you need more fancy things, consider using a scripting language like python instead.

Boilerplate

To make bash scripts behave as we’d expect, some boilerplate is needed.

  • Stop on any kind of failure
  • Echo the commands run (convenient to debug a failing CI job)

So, start a bash script using:

#!/bin/bash
set -eoxu pipefail

See explainshell.com for what it does.

Linting

Make sure you shell scripts are linted using shellcheck. You could use shfmt as a formatter in local development.