This project now has its own homepage at bash3boilerplate.sh.

I recently tweeted a few best practices that I picked up over the years and got some good feedback. I decided to write them all down in a blogpost. Here goes

  1. Use long options (logger --priority vs logger -p). If you're on cli, abbreviations make sense for efficiency. but when you're writing reusable scripts a few extra keystrokes will pay off in readability and avoid ventures into man pages in the future by you or your collaborators.

  2. Use set -o errexit (a.k.a. set -e) to make your script exit when a command fails.

  3. Then add || true to commands that you allow to fail.

  4. Use set -o nounset (a.k.a. set -u) to exit when your script tries to use undeclared variables.

  5. Use set -o xtrace (a.k.a set -x) to trace what gets executed. Useful for debugging.

  6. Use set -o pipefail in scripts to catch mysqldump fails in e.g. mysqldump |gzip. The exit status of the last command that threw a non-zero exit code is returned.

  7. #!/usr/bin/env bash is more portable than #!/bin/bash.

  8. Avoid using #!/usr/bin/env bash -e (vs set -e), because when someone runs your script as bash ./script.sh, the exit on error will be ignored.

  9. Surround your variables with {}. Otherwise bash will try to access the $ENVIRONMENT_app variable in /srv/$ENVIRONMENT_app, whereas you probably intended /srv/${ENVIRONMENT}_app.

  10. You don't need two equal signs when checking if [ "${NAME}" = "Kevin" ].

  11. Surround your variable with " in if [ "${NAME}" = "Kevin" ], because if $NAME isn't declared, bash will throw a syntax error (also see nounset).

  12. Use :- if you want to test variables that could be undeclared. For instance: if [ "${NAME:-}" = "Kevin" ] will set $NAME to be empty if it's not declared. You can also set it to noname like so if [ "${NAME:-noname}" = "Kevin" ]

  13. Set magic variables for current file, basename, and directory at the top of your script for convenience.

Summarizing, why not start your next bash script like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Bash3 Boilerplate. Copyright (c) 2014, kvz.io

set -o errexit
set -o pipefail
set -o nounset
# set -o xtrace

# Set magic variables for current file & dir
__dir="$(cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" && pwd)"
__file="${__dir}/$(basename "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")"
__base="$(basename ${__file} .sh)"
__root="$(cd "$(dirname "${__dir}")" && pwd)" # <-- change this as it depends on your app

arg1="${1:-}"

If you have additional tips, please share and I'll update this post.