Lint your shell scripts

I will start this by quoting the bashstyle’s readme:

Bash is like the JavaScript of systems programming. Although in some cases it’s better to use a systems language like C or Go, Bash is actually an ideal systems language for many smaller POSIX-oriented or command line tasks.

Here’s three quick reasons why:

• It’s everywhere. Like JavaScript for the web, Bash is already there ready for systems programming.
• It’s neutral. Unlike Ruby, Python, JavaScript, or PHP, Bash offends equally across all communities. ;)
• It’s made to be glue. Write complex parts in C or Go (or whatever!), and glue them together with Bash.

My concern about that is the quality of the code itself. Like JavaScript, most people will just Google and do what they want in the first way that they found - quick and dirty. You can blame me too.

So, projects like bashstyle are important to set a common sense in how to do things using bash. The problem is that it’s not automated.

A project that really helps with that is shellcheck. It’s an executable written in Haskell, which can lint your scripts (in bash, zsh, and others). Sure enough, we can put this in a Continuous Integration system and watch it do the validation for us.

To make it easy to integrate shellcheck and travis-ci, I created a project called shell-travis-build. It is intended to be added as a submodule, like this:

$ git submodule add https://github.com/caarlos0/shell-travis-build.git build
$ cp build/travis.yml.example .travis.yml

Travis will always clone a project with its submodules before the build, so, it will always work. :beer:

I’m already using this in my dotfiles, and found some really stupid mistakes to fix. Sure thing, this is an awesome tool!

Wanna see it in the so said real world? Check my dotfilesbuild.sh and travis.yml files.

Happy hacking!