Automating my set-up on a fresh Ubuntu by using a bash script

Originally published at andreigatej.dev.

The Github repository can be found here.

It usually takes me around 30 minutes - 1 hour to set up everything I need in order to start working on a new OS(in this case, Ubuntu). So I figured it would be worth the time spent on building a script that would automate all of this. Moreover, bash scripting has always been something cryptic to me, so I thought this was a good opportunity to get comfortable with writing such scripts.

Usage

Open your terminal in your preferred location and create a file that will eventually be invoked in order to install the programs you'd need.

# `vim` could be replaced with your text editor of choice(e.g `gedit`)
touch setup && vim $_

Paste the content of the setup.sh file into the newly created file.

Run the script with:

sudo bash setup $HOME

We need sudo privileges because the script will install new programs on the OS and $HOME in order to properly place ZSH and to determine the user so we can add it to the docker group.

---

How it works

The file comprises functions that will install the needed programs. Each function follows this pattern: function installProgramToBeInstalled { }.

For example:

# ...

function installGit {
  format_output "installing git"

  sudo apt install -y git

  echo
}

function installDocker {
  format_output "installing docker"

  curl -s https://get.docker.com/ | bash

  usermod -aG docker $user

  su - $user

  echo
}
# ...

Then, in order to invoke all the functions, I've used this logic:

functions="$(cat $0 | egrep -o install[A-Z]+[A-Za-z]+)"
for f in $functions; do $f;done

$0 refers to the current file. With egrep -o install[A-Z]+[A-Za-z]+) we get all the install functions. Lastly, we loop through each function and invoke it.