Bash-it

Bash-it is a collection of community Bash commands and scripts for Bash 3.2+. (And a shameless ripoff of oh-my-zsh 😃)

Includes autocompletion, themes, aliases, custom functions, a few stolen pieces from Steve Losh, and more.

Bash-it provides a solid framework for using, developing and maintaining shell scripts and custom commands for your daily work. If you're using the Bourne Again Shell (Bash) on a regular basis and have been looking for an easy way on how to keep all of these nice little scripts and aliases under control, then Bash-it is for you! Stop polluting your ~/bin directory and your .bashrc file, fork/clone Bash-it and start hacking away.

• Contributing
• Installation
  • Install Options
  • via Docker
  • Updating
• Help
• Search
  • Syntax
  • Searching with Negations
  • Using Search to Enable or Disable Components
  • Disabling ASCII Color
• Custom scripts, aliases, themes, and functions
• Themes
• Uninstalling
• Misc
• Help Out
• Contributors

Contributing

Please take a look at the Contribution Guidelines before reporting a bug or providing a new feature.

The Development Guidelines have more information on some of the internal workings of Bash-it, please feel free to read through this page if you're interested in how Bash-it loads its components.

Installation

1. Check out a clone of this repo to a location of your choice, such as git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/Bash-it/bash-it.git ~/.bash_it
2. Run ~/.bash_it/install.sh (it automatically backs up your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc, depending on your OS)
3. Edit your modified config (~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc) file in order to customize Bash-it.
4. Check out available aliases, completions, and plugins and enable the ones you want to use (see the next section for more details).

Install Options

The install script can take the following options:

• --interactive: Asks the user which aliases, completions and plugins to enable.
• --silent: Ask nothing and install using default settings.
• --no-modify-config: Do not modify the existing config file (~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc).

When run without the --interactive switch, Bash-it only enables a sane default set of functionality to keep your shell clean and to avoid issues with missing dependencies. Feel free to enable the tools you want to use after the installation.

When you run without the --no-modify-config switch, the Bash-it installer automatically modifies/replaces your existing config file. Use the --no-modify-config switch to avoid unwanted modifications, e.g. if your Bash config file already contains the code that loads Bash-it.

NOTE: Keep in mind how Bash load its configuration files, .bash_profile for login shells (and in macOS in terminal emulators like Terminal.app or iTerm2) and .bashrc for interactive shells (default mode in most of the GNU/Linux terminal emulators), to ensure that Bash-it is loaded correctly. A good "practice" is sourcing .bashrc into .bash_profile to keep things working in all the scenarios. To achieve this, you can add this snippet in your .bash_profile:

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
  . ~/.bashrc
fi

Refer to the official Bash documentation to get more info.

Install using Docker

You can try Bash-it in an isolated environment without changing any local files via a Docker Container. (Bash Shell v4.4 with Bash-it, bats and bash-completion based on Alpine Linux).

docker pull ellerbrock/bash-it

Have a look at our bash-it-docker repository for further information.

Updating

To update Bash-it to the latest version, simply run:

bash-it update

that's all.

If you are using an older version of Bash-it, it's possible that some functionality has changed, or that the internal structure of how Bash-it organizes its functionality has been updated. For these cases, we provide a migrate command:

bash-it migrate

This command will automatically migrate the Bash-it structure to the latest version. The migrate command is run automatically if you run the update, enable or disable commands.

Help Screens

bash-it show aliases        # shows installed and available aliases
bash-it show completions    # shows installed and available completions
bash-it show plugins        # shows installed and available plugins
bash-it help aliases        # shows help for installed aliases
bash-it help completions    # shows help for installed completions
bash-it help plugins        # shows help for installed plugins

Search

If you need to quickly find out which of the plugins, aliases or completions are available for a specific framework, programming language, or an environment, you can search for multiple terms related to the commands you use frequently. Search will find and print out modules with the name or description matching the terms provided.

Syntax

  bash-it search term1 [[-]term2] [[-]term3]....

As an example, a ruby developer might want to enable everything related to the commands such as ruby, rake, gem, bundler, and rails. Search command helps you find related modules so that you can decide which of them you'd like to use:

❯ bash-it search ruby rake gem bundle irb rails
      aliases:  bundler rails
      plugins:  chruby chruby-auto ruby
  completions:  bundler gem rake

Currently enabled modules will be shown in green.

Searching with Negations

You can prefix a search term with a "-" to exclude it from the results. In the above example, if we wanted to hide chruby and chruby-auto, we could change the command as follows:

❯ bash-it search ruby rake gem bundle irb rails -chruby
      aliases:  bundler rails
      plugins:  ruby
  completions:  bundler gem rake

Using Search to Enable or Disable Components

By adding a --enable or --disable to the search command, you can automatically enable all modules that come up as a result of a search query. This could be quite handy if you like to enable a bunch of components related to the same topic.

Disabling ASCII Color

To remove non-printing non-ASCII characters responsible for the coloring of the search output, you can set environment variable NO_COLOR. Enabled components will then be shown with a checkmark:

❯ NO_COLOR=1 bash-it search ruby rake gem bundle irb rails -chruby
      aliases  =>   ✓bundler ✓rails
      plugins  =>   ✓ruby
  completions  =>   bundler gem rake

Custom scripts, aliases, themes, and functions

For custom scripts, and aliases, just create the following files (they'll be ignored by the git repo):

• aliases/custom.aliases.bash
• completion/custom.completion.bash
• lib/custom.bash
• plugins/custom.plugins.bash
• custom/themes/<custom theme name>/<custom theme name>.theme.bash

Anything in the custom directory will be ignored, with the exception of custom/example.bash.

Alternately, if you would like to keep your custom scripts under version control, you can set BASH_IT_CUSTOM in your ~/.bashrc to another location outside of the $BASH_IT folder. In this case, any *.bash file under every directory below BASH_IT_CUSTOM folder will be used.

Themes

There are over 50+ Bash-it themes to pick from in $BASH_IT/themes. The default theme is bobby. Set BASH_IT_THEME to the theme name you want, or if you've developed your own custom theme outside of $BASH_IT/themes, point the BASH_IT_THEME variable directly to the theme file. To disable theming completely, leave the variable empty.

Examples:

# Use the "powerline-multiline" theme
export BASH_IT_THEME="powerline-multiline"

# Use a theme outside of the Bash-it folder
export BASH_IT_THEME="/home/foo/my_theme/my_theme.theme.bash"

# Disable theming
export BASH_IT_THEME=""

You can easily preview the themes in your own shell using BASH_PREVIEW=true bash-it reload.

If you've created your own custom prompts, we'd love it if you shared with everyone else! Just submit a Pull Request. You can see theme screenshots on wiki/Themes.

NOTE: Bash-it and some themes use UTF-8 characters, so to avoid strange behavior in your terminal, set your locale to LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 or the equivalent to your language if it isn't American English.

Uninstalling

To uninstall Bash-it, run the uninstall.sh script found in the $BASH_IT directory:

cd $BASH_IT
./uninstall.sh

This will restore your previous Bash profile. After the uninstall script finishes, remove the Bash-it directory from your machine (rm -rf $BASH_IT) and start a new shell.

Misc

Bash Profile Aliases

Bash-it creates a reload alias that makes it convenient to reload your Bash profile when you make changes.

Additionally, if you export BASH_IT_AUTOMATIC_RELOAD_AFTER_CONFIG_CHANGE as a non-null value, Bash-it will automatically reload itself after activating or deactivating plugins, aliases, or completions.

Prompt Version Control Check

Bash-it provides prompt themes the ability to check and display version control information for the current directory. The information is retrieved for each directory and can slow down the navigation of projects with a large number of files and folders. Turn version control checking off to prevent slow directory navigation within large projects.

Bash-it provides a flag (SCM_CHECK) within the ~/.bash_profile file that turns off/on version control information checking and display within all themes. Version control checking is on by default unless explicitly turned off.

Set SCM_CHECK to 'false' to turn off version control checks for all themes:

• export SCM_CHECK=false

Set SCM_CHECK to 'true' (the default value) to turn on version control checks for all themes:

• export SCM_CHECK=true

NOTE: It is possible for themes to ignore the SCM_CHECK flag and query specific version control information directly. For example, themes that use functions like git_prompt_vars skip the SCM_CHECK flag to retrieve and display git prompt information. If you turned version control checking off and you still see version control information within your prompt, then functions like git_prompt_vars are most likely the reason why.

Git prompt

Bash-it has some nice features related to Git, continue reading to know more about these features.

Repository info in the prompt

Bash-it can show some information about Git repositories in the shell prompt: the current branch, tag or commit you are at, how many commits the local branch is ahead or behind from the remote branch, and if you have changes stashed.

Additionally, you can view the status of your working copy and get the count of staged, unstaged and untracked files. This feature is controlled through the flag SCM_GIT_SHOW_DETAILS as follows:

Set SCM_GIT_SHOW_DETAILS to 'true' (the default value) to show the working copy details in your prompt:

• export SCM_GIT_SHOW_DETAILS=true

Set SCM_GIT_SHOW_DETAILS to 'false' to don't show it:

• export SCM_GIT_SHOW_DETAILS=false

NOTE: If using SCM_GIT_SHOW_MINIMAL_INFO=true, then the value of SCM_GIT_SHOW_DETAILS is ignored.

Remotes and remote branches

In some git workflows, you must work with various remotes, for this reason, Bash-it can provide some useful information about your remotes and your remote branches, for example, the remote on you are working, or if your local branch is tracking a remote branch.

You can control this feature with the flag SCM_GIT_SHOW_REMOTE_INFO as follows:

Set SCM_GIT_SHOW_REMOTE_INFO to 'auto' (the default value) to activate it only when more than one remote is configured in the current repo:

• export SCM_GIT_SHOW_REMOTE_INFO=auto

Set SCM_GIT_SHOW_REMOTE_INFO to 'true' to always activate the feature:

• export SCM_GIT_SHOW_REMOTE_INFO=true

Set SCM_GIT_SHOW_REMOTE_INFO to 'false' to disable the feature:

• export SCM_GIT_SHOW_REMOTE_INFO=false

NOTE: If using SCM_GIT_SHOW_MINIMAL_INFO=true, then the value of SCM_GIT_SHOW_REMOTE_INFO is ignored.

Untracked files

By default, the git status command shows information about untracked files. This behavior can be controlled through command-line flags or git configuration files. For big repositories, ignoring untracked files can make git faster. Bash-it uses git status to gather the repo information it shows in the prompt, so in some circumstances, it can be useful to instruct Bash-it to ignore these files. You can control this behavior with the flag SCM_GIT_IGNORE_UNTRACKED:

Set SCM_GIT_IGNORE_UNTRACKED to 'false' (the default value) to get information about untracked files:

• export SCM_GIT_IGNORE_UNTRACKED=false

Set SCM_GIT_IGNORE_UNTRACKED to 'true' to ignore untracked files:

• export SCM_GIT_IGNORE_UNTRACKED=true

Also, with this flag to false, Bash-it will not show the repository as dirty when the repo has untracked files, and will not display the count of untracked files.

NOTE: If you set in git configuration file the option to ignore untracked files, this flag has no effect, and Bash-it will ignore untracked files always.

Stash item count

When SCM_GIT_SHOW_DETAILS is enabled, you can get the count of stashed items. This feature can be useful when a user has a lot of stash items. This feature is controlled through the flag SCM_GIT_SHOW_STASH_INFO as follows:

Set SCM_GIT_SHOW_STASH_INFO to 'true' (the default value) to show the count of stashed items:

• export SCM_GIT_SHOW_STASH_INFO=true

Set SCM_GIT_SHOW_STASH_INFO to 'false' to don't show it:

• export SCM_GIT_SHOW_STASH_INFO=false

Git user

In some environments, it is useful to know the value of the current git user, which is used to mark all new commits. For example, any organization that uses the practice of pair programming will typically author each commit with combined names of the two authors. When another pair uses the same pairing station, the authors are changed at the beginning of the session.

To get up and running with this technique, run gem install pivotal_git_scripts, and then edit your ~/.pairs file, according to the specification on the gem's homepage. After that, you should be able to run git pair kg as to set the author to, eg. "Konstantin Gredeskoul and Alex Saxby", assuming they've been added to the ~/.pairs file. Please see gem's documentation for more information.

To enable the display of the current pair in the prompt, you must set SCM_GIT_SHOW_CURRENT_USER to true. Once set, the SCM_CURRENT_USER variable will be automatically populated with the initials of the git author(s). It will also be included in the default git prompt. Even if you do not have git pair installed, as long as your user.name is set, your initials will be computed from your name and shown in the prompt.

You can control the prefix and the suffix of this component using the two variables:

• export SCM_THEME_CURRENT_USER_PREFFIX=' ☺︎ '

And

• export SCM_THEME_CURRENT_USER_SUFFIX=' ☺︎ '

NOTE: If using SCM_GIT_SHOW_MINIMAL_INFO=true, then the value of SCM_GIT_SHOW_CURRENT_USER is ignored.

Git show minimal status info

To speed up the prompt while still getting minimal git status information displayed such as the value of HEAD and whether there are any dirty objects, you can set:

export SCM_GIT_SHOW_MINIMAL_INFO=true

Ignore repo status

When working in repos with a large codebase, Bash-it can slow down your prompt when checking the repo status. To avoid it, there is an option you can set via Git config to disable checking repo status in Bash-it.

To disable checking the status in the current repo:

$ git config --add bash-it.hide-status 1

But if you would like to disable it globally, and stop checking the status for all of your repos:

$ git config --global --add bash-it.hide-status 1

Setting this flag globally has the same effect as SCM_CHECK=true, but only for Git repos.

Pass function renamed to passgen

The Bash-it pass function has been renamed to passgen in order to avoid a naming conflict with the pass password manager. In order to minimize the impact on users of the legacy Bash-it pass function, Bash-it will create the alias pass that calls the new passgen function if the pass password manager command is not found on the PATH (default behavior).

This behavior can be overridden with the BASH_IT_LEGACY_PASS flag as follows:

Set BASH_IT_LEGACY_PASS to 'true' to force Bash-it to always create the pass alias to passgen:

• export BASH_IT_LEGACY_PASS=true

Unset BASH_IT_LEGACY_PASS to have Bash-it return to default behavior:

• unset BASH_IT_LEGACY_PASS

Proxy Support

If you are working in a corporate environment where you have to go through a proxy server for internet access, then you know how painful it is to configure the OS proxy variables in the shell, especially if you are switching between environments, e.g. office (with proxy) and home (without proxy).

The Bash shell (and many shell tools) use the following variables to define the proxy to use:

• HTTP_PROXY (and http_proxy): Defines the proxy server for HTTP requests
• HTTPS_PROXY (and https_proxy): Defines the proxy server for HTTPS requests
• ALL_PROXY (and all_proxy): Used by some tools for the same purpose as above
• NO_PROXY (and no_proxy): Comma-separated list of hostnames that don't have to go through the proxy

Bash-it's proxy plugin allows to enable and disable these variables with a simple command. To start using the proxy plugin, run the following:

bash-it enable plugin proxy

Bash-it also provides support for enabling/disabling proxy settings for various shell tools. The following backends are currently supported (in addition to the shell's environment variables): Git, SVN, npm, ssh. The proxy plugin changes the configuration files of these tools to enable or disable the proxy settings.

Bash-it uses the following variables to set the shell's proxy settings when you call enable-proxy. These variables are best defined in a custom script in Bash-it's custom script folder ($BASH_IT/custom), e.g. $BASH_IT/custom/proxy.env.bash

• BASH_IT_HTTP_PROXY and BASH_IT_HTTPS_PROXY: Define the proxy URL to be used, e.g. 'http://localhost:1234'
• BASH_IT_NO_PROXY: A comma-separated list of proxy exclusions, e.g. 127.0.0.1,localhost

Once you have defined these variables (and have run reload to load the changes), you can use the following commands to enable or disable the proxy settings in your current shell:

• enable-proxy: This sets the shell's proxy environment variables and configures proxy support in your SVN, npm, and SSH configuration files.
• disable-proxy: This unsets the shell's proxy environment variables and disables proxy support in your SVN, npm, and SSH configuration files.

There are many more proxy commands, e.g. for changing the local Git project's proxy settings. Run glossary proxy to show the available proxy functions with a short description.

Help out

We think everyone has their own custom scripts accumulated over time. And so, following in the footsteps of oh-my-zsh, Bash-it is a framework for easily customizing your Bash shell. Everyone's got a custom toolbox, so let's start making them even better, as a community!

Send us a pull request and we'll merge it as long as it looks good. If you change an existing command, please give an explanation why. That will help a lot when we merge your changes in.

Please take a look at the Contribution Guidelines before reporting a bug or providing a new feature.

Thanks, and happing bashing!

Contributors

• List of contributors