Usage

Run commands from the repo root.

Help

Commands are defined in the Makefile. See that file for more detailed commands.

Or run the help command:

$ make help

Manage packages

Install packages:

$ make install

This is useful on a new system or after making changes to the shell files of what should be installed.

Upgrade packages:

$ make upgrade

You can run the install command repeatedly safely, but it might keep you at the current version. While the upgrade command forces upgrading to the latest.

It is useful to run the install command whenever there are changes to this repo, such as adding a new package to be installed. Or if packages were uninstalled manually or accidentally and you want to return to the state indicated by this repo.

Node.js

As part of the install steps, Node will be installed using a version configured in Makefile.

To install just Node, using the configured version, run this:

$ make replace-node

To uninstall Node and then install a target Node version, run this:

$ make replace-node NODE_VERSION=12

APT vs not APT

Note that while Rust and Go which could be setup with APT rather than by a manual install with curl, I prefer the manual approach. It’s more verbose initially but easy to manage later. Plus this project manages the curl commands so you don’t have to it.

With APT, it gets confusing when you use the tool’s CLI to upgrade to a newer version but APT still thinks it has an older version. Also, APT’s repositories will not be as up to date.

I discuss this further in a blog post here.

Automation

I recommend to not run the install or upgrade commands on a cron schedule.

Linux systems usually have a package manage GUI tool which can be setup to prompt you daily to upgrade packages.

Also, sometimes the APT tool’s upgrade requires you explicitly approval upgrading and it will block the flow until you response. This approval cannot be done with a flag and must b done by hand when prompted with y/N prompt.

Clean

Auto-remove unneeded packages and clear space in the APT cache and

$ make clean

That uses APT commands:

autoremove - Remove automatically all unused packages.
clean - Erase downloaded archive files (i.e. delete cache).

Note - this project will not uninstall APT packages if they are removed from the install script, so you’ll need to manually clean-up after packages are they removed.

sudo apt-get remove PACKAGE

Checks

Run these at any time as they only read data.

Versions of CLI tools, if they are installed.

$ make audit

Installed packages.

$ make list-apt
$ make list-py

List upgradeable packages.

$ make apt-upgrade-dry

Install IDE

Follow Install VS Code guide to install from a Debian package.

Updates to VS Code can be managed from within APT after that.

Python

Install or upgrade global Python packages.

$ make py

Note that defaulting to latest version is not always appropriate because of dependencies between packages (e.g. pylint 2.5.3 needs older isort).

Having a requirements doesn’t seem to make these easier (maybe it does for some checks) Still, a .txt file is more of a known pattern than using shell commands.

Note on Python package locations

On Unix-based systems, these install the current PY3 version’s site packages such as here: ` /usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages`

To make those executable, there are short entry points stored in /usr/local/bin.

Example:

/usr/local/bin/black

  #!/usr/local/opt/python/bin/python3.7
  # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  import re
  import sys
  from black import patched_main
  if __name__ == '__main__':
      sys.argv[0] = re.sub(r'(-script\.pyw|\.exe)?$', '', sys.argv[0])
      sys.exit(patched_main())

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The easy and predictable way to setup and manage a Linux dev environment