The sysadmin prompt

You have your favourite shell (which is of course fish) throughly configured and customised. But despite all your terraforms and ansibles and sshfses, your job as a sysadmin requires you to ssh-hop between a large number of servers and VMs to herd dæmons. And often you're in some service-specific account in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the default prompt of your distro.

The sysadmin prompt is designed to be a zero-configuration drop-in file that will run anywhere,¹ and give you information useful to have on every line. Extra frills are provided when available, and won't generate errors when not.

Install

Just put the script anywhere you like, source it at the end of .bashrc and you're set. Or do this:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/melissaboiko/sysadmin-prompt.bash/trunk/sysadmin_prompt.bash
source sysadmin_prompt.bash install

and it will append a line to .bashrc for you.

Prompt features

• Automatically chosen but deterministic colours for user- and hostnames, making changes in environment more noticeable;
• user@hostname always present, with root shells always in red (including root aliases like BSD toor);
• Detects SSH even under sudo;
• Basic virtual machine detection;
• Exit status of last command;
• Time elapsed for last command (seconds resolution, won't count time spent at prompt);
• How many jobs are hanging in background for this shell;
• Whole rest of line for current path;
• Including, if the standard git-prompt.sh (or variations) is found, git information;
• A newline for clarity;
• A continuation character and the standard shell prompt character, always in the same screen position, and highlighted for root sheels.

TODO

• Light background mode.
• Better perfomance on android.
• Test suite.

Compatibility notes

This prompt has been tested extensively on recent-ish Linux+bash combos (ca. 2017 onwards).

It's also been used with zero configuration on BSD, OpenWRT, pfSense, LXD-LXC containers, and Docker containers. No seeming issues, but not as tested.

Suport for Android bash under adb is preliminary. The current release may need manual installation, and not be as performant.

Pull requests for portability will be accepted, including for older bash versions, but this project isn't meant for POSIX sh or zsh or other shells (if you can run better shells, it's probably a host you can configure freely and run fish, right?). Contributors please take care with performance hits in the prompt_command function.