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Netspective Studios Typical Polyglot Creator's Home Setup

This is our opinionated chezmoi- and asdf-based "engineering sandbox home" setup for polyglot software development or any other "creator tasks" that are performed on Linux-like operating systems. Better project environment management with direnv and asdf is a good intro to the benefits of asdf.

If you're using Windows 10 with WSL2, create a "disposable" Debian 11 WSL2 instance using Windows Store. This project treats the WSL2 instance as "disposable" meaning it's for development only and can easily be destroyed and recreated whenever necessary. The cost for creation and destruction for a Engineering Sandbox should be so low that it should be treated almost as a container rather than a VM.

If you're using a Debian-based distro you should be able to run this repo in any Debian user account. It will probably work with any Linux-like OS but has only been tested on Debian-based distros (e.g. Debian 11 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS).

Linux versions

Use Debian 11+ or Ubuntu 20.04+ LTS, both are freely available in the Windows Store for WSL2 or as VMs in Hyper-V.

After you install, double-check your version:

sudo apt-get -qq update && sudo apt-get -qq install -y lsb-release && lsb_release -a

You should see something like this:

Distributor ID: Debian
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Release:        11
Codename:       bullseye

One-time setup

Bootstrap a Debian environment with required utilities:

cd $HOME && sudo apt-get -qq update && sudo apt-get install curl -y -qq && \
    curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/netspective-studios/home-creators/master/bootstrap-admin-debian.sh | bash

We use chezmoi with templates to manage our dotfiles across multiple diverse machines, securely. The bootstrap-* script has already created the chezmoi config file which you should personalize before installing chezmoi. See chezmoi.toml Example to help understand the variables that can be set and used across chezmoi templates.

# Personalize your chezmoi config
vim.tiny ~/.config/chezmoi/chezmoi.toml
# Apply your chezmoi template
sh -c "$(curl -fsLS git.io/chezmoi)" -- init --apply netspective-studios/home-creators

We prefer ZSH as the default shell. Run ZSH for Humans (z4h) installer:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/romkatv/zsh4humans/v5/install)"

Finalize .zshrc setup and then exit your shell:

cat << 'EOF' >> ~/.zshrc
z4h source ~/.asdf/asdf.sh                      # version management
z4h source -- ~/.config/z4h-zshrc/*.auto.zshrc  # automatically loaded zshrc's
z4h source ~/.config/z4h-zshrc/homectl.zshrc    # homectl zshrc coordinator
EOF
exit

Open a new terminal then complete the initial setup using homectl:

cd $HOME && homectl setup setup-asdf-plugins-typical setup-data-engr-enhanced

After initial setup cd ~ && just (cmd) will be equivalent to homectl (cmd). homectl is one of many aliases defined by the auto-imported ~/.config/z4h-zshrc/aliases.auto.zshrc file. Personalize z4h with your own preferences. Learn how to use z4h to keep it up to date and understand the recommended customization approach.

Customize your aliases and functions in ~/.config/z4h-zshrc/*.auto.zshrc -- basically, any file in your ~/.config/z4h-zshrc directory that has the *.auto.zshrc extension will be automatically sourced by z4h into each shell.

One-time Install of Optional Packages

# if you're doing PostgreSQL database development and need psql command
# $HOME/.pgpass and $HOME/.psqlrc are part of chezmoi dotfiles
sudo apt-get install postgresql-client -y -qq

 # install DBA type utilities, usually in $HOME/bin
homectl setup-db-admin

# if you're doing your own software builds (instead of using binaries)
sudo apt-get -y -qq install build-essential zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev libgdbm-dev libnss3-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev libxml2-dev xz-utils tk-dev libxmlsec1-dev libreadline-dev libffi-dev libbz2-dev liblzma-dev llvm

Routine Maintenance

On a daily, weekly, or monthly basis run:

homectl maintain

Contributing

PRs are welcome. If you're making changes directly (without a PR), after updating and before pushing code, tag the release:

chezmoi cd
# <git commit ...>
git-chglog --output CHANGELOG.md
git commit -m "auto generate content" CHANGELOG.md
git-semtag final && git push
# or git-semtag final -v "vN.N.N" && git push

FAQ

  • Why do I see jq: error (at <stdin>:1): Cannot index object with number at the CLI sometimes?
    • We use the GitHub API to get the latest versions of repos. For example curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/asdf-vm/asdf/tags | jq '.[0].name' -r returns the latest version of the ASDF library. When GitHub reaches its limit the https://api.github.com/repos/asdf-vm/asdf/tags URL will return 503 Forbidden and then jq will fail. The message jq: error (at <stdin>:1): Cannot index object with number fools us into thinking the issue is with jq but the issues is that GitHub reached the API rate limit per hour.

What's Installed

  • We use $HOME/bin for binaries whenever possible instead globally installing them using sudo.
  • We use git and git-extras because we're a GitOps shop.
  • We use asdf as our package manager to install all languages and utilities possible so that they can be easily installed and, more importantly, support multiple versions simultaneously.
  • We use just command runner to execute tasks (available in $HOME/bin). We favor just over make for new packages but make is still a great tool for legacy requirements.
  • We use pass the standard unix password manager for managing secrets that should not be in plaintext.
  • To see the rest, run homectl doctor which lists all the "standard" (typical) tools and their versions

Secrets Management

Managed Git Repos (GitHub, GitLab, etc.) Tools

Please review the bundled Managed Git and opinionated set of instructions and tools for managing code workspaces that depend on multiple repositories.

We use Semantic Versioning so be sure to learn and regularly use the semtag bash script that is installed as git-semtag in $HOME/bin by homectl setup task.

For example:

chez cd
# perform regular git commits
git chglog --output CHANGELOG.md && git commit -m "auto-generate CHANGELOG.md" CHANGELOG.md
git semtag final
# or 'git semtag final -v "v0.5.0"' for specific version
git push

Polyglot Languages Installation and Version Management

Netspective Studios projects assume that asdf is being used for version management of programming languages (Java, Go, etc.) and runtime environments (Deno, NodeJS, Python, etc.) and direnv is being used for project-specific environments.

You can install languages and other packages like this:

asdf plugin add golang
asdf plugin add nodejs

asdf install golang latest
asdf install nodejs latest

asdf global golang latest
asdf global nodejs latest
...

asdf current

Or, use the convenience tasks in homectl:

homectl setup-asdf-plugin java          # Install the plugin and its latest stable version but don't set the version
homectl setup-asdf-plugin julia
...
homectl setup-asdf-plugin-global hugo   # Install the named plugin, its latest stable release, and then set it as the global version
homectl setup-asdf-plugin-global python
homectl setup-asdf-plugin-global haxe
homectl setup-asdf-plugin-global neko
...
asdf current

Important per-project and per-directory configuration management tools

We use asdf to manage almost all languages and utilities so that they can be easily installed and, more importantly, support multiple versions simultaneously. For example, we heavily use Deno for multiple projects but each project might require a different version. asdf supports global, per session, and per project (directory) version configuration strategy.

asdf has centrally managed plugins for many languages and runtimes and there are even more contributed plugins for additional languages and runtimes.

There are good asdf videos worth watching.

In addition to asdf which supports a flexible version configuration strategy for languages and runtimes, we use direnv to encourage usage of environment variables with per-directory flexibility. Per their documentation:

direnv is an extension for your shell. It augments existing shells with a new feature that can load and unload environment variables depending on the current directory.

We use direnv and .envrc files to manage environments on a per-directory (per-project and descendant directories) basis. direnv can be used to manage secrets as well as non-secret configurations. Many other development automation techniques are possible.

There are some direnv YouTube videos worth watching to get familar with the capabilities.

Data Engineering

Default data tools installed in ~/bin:

  • Miller is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON.
  • daff library for comparing tables, producing a summary of their differences.

If you run homectl setup-data-engr-enhanced you also get:

  • csvtk is a cross-platform, efficient and practical CSV/TSV toolkit in Golang.
  • xsv is a fast CSV command line toolkit written in Rust.
  • OctoSQL is a query tool that allows you to join, analyse and transform data from multiple databases and file formats using SQL.
  • q - Run SQL directly on CSV or TSV files.
  • Dasel jq/yq for JSON, YAML, TOML, XML and CSV with zero runtime dependencies.

Beneficial Add-ons

gitui terminal-ui for Git

GitUI provides you with the comfort of a git GUI but right in your terminal. Per their website, "this tool does not fully substitute the git CLI, however both tools work well in tandem". It can be installed using:

homectl setup-asdf-plugin-global gitui https://github.com/looztra/asdf-gitui

TODO (Roadmap)

Need to consider adding the following over time.

Switch all Git-related Justfile repo-oriented commands to git-*

So that we can call git (command), switch commands in mgitctl.justfile and workspaces.justfile into get-* shell scripts (or aliases).

Use .netrc and -n with curl commands

See Do you use curl? Stop using -u. Please use curl -n and .netrc. We should update all references to curl to include curl -n so that .netrc is optionally pulled in when we need to use the following configuration:

machine api.github.com
  login gitHubUserName
  password gh-personal-access-token

When we run into problems of API rate limiting with anonymous use of api.github.com then users can easily switch to authenticated use of api.github.com which will increase rate limits.

Use asdf install with .tool-versions to auto-install

Per asdf .tool-versions documentation:

To install all the tools defined in a .tool-versions file run asdf install with no other arguments in the directory containing the .tool-versions file.

To install a single tool defined in a .tool-versions file run asdf install in the directory containing the .tool-versions file. The tool will be installed at the version specified in the .tool-versions file.

Edit the file directly or use asdf local (or asdf global) which updates it.

This might better than trying to give installation instructions in README.md and other per-project files.

Basically in each of our Git repos we can give .tool-versions and then each project user can just run asdf install.

Install optional packages via chezmoi

Consider moving items from Justfile (homectl) into run_once_install-packages.sh.tmpl. By moving from just to chezmoi we benefit from templating and better configuration. See:

chezmoi execute-template '{{ .chezmoi.osRelease.id }}'      # e.g. debian or ubuntu
chezmoi execute-template '{{ .chezmoi.osRelease.idLike }}'  # e.g. debian if running ubuntu

If a release is Debian or Debian-like (e.g. Ubuntu and others) we should automatically install some packages through chezmoi scripts to perform actions. This might be a better way to install postgresql-client and other database-specific functionality as well as other packages.

IDEs and Editors

  • Integrate Helix as our opinionated terminal editor.

IP Management (IPM)

  • Integrate augmentable-dev/askgit or similar tool to query git repositories with SQL (generate reports, perform status checks, analyze codebases).

File Management

  • Integrate Wildland, a collection of protocols, conventions, and software, which creates a union file system across S3, WebDAV, K8s, and other storage providers.

Data Publishing

  • Datasette multi-tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps data journalists and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world take data of any shape or size, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.

Data Engineering

  • sqlite-utils-memory can join and select CSV and JSON data via stdin with an in-memory SQLite database
  • sqlite-utils CLI utility and Python library for manipulating SQLite databases
  • db-to-sqlite CLI tool for exporting tables or queries from any SQL database to a SQLite file to make data portable.
  • jOOQ Parser to translate any SQL statement(s) to a different dialect
  • A list of command line tools for manipulating structured text data is available at https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools
  • eBay's TSV Utilities: Command line tools for large, tabular data files. Filtering, statistics, sampling, joins and more.
  • pgLoader can either load data from files, such as CSV or Fixed-File Format; or migrate a whole database to PostgreSQL
  • dbcrossbar copies large, tabular datasets between many different databases and storage formats. Data can be copied from any source to any destination.