project specific settings using zshell and dotfiles

29 Jul 2012

I have been working with ZHell pretty much since the first day that I have been using a Mac.

The use I make of to grew with time and definitely the biggest switch was that I moved to using dotfiles for settings in a single location.

I forked Zach Holman dot files here, and I have been adjusting and customizing it ever since.

I am using Ruby/Rails for my everyday work, both for consulting and open source projects, the one thing that I see people do and I don’t like is committing configuration files with password and sensitive information into source control.

When I can, I try to avoid it, so I developed a very easy way to manage my per-project environment variable without going through a huge file.

All of my zsh files are located in a single folder in my dotfiles.

├── aliases.zsh
├── completion.zsh
├── config.zsh
├── functions
│   ├── _boom
│   ├── _brew
│   ├── _c
│   ├── _git-rm
│   ├── _h
│   ├── _rake
│   ├── c
│   ├── gf
│   ├── gitdays
│   ├── h
│   ├── last_modified
│   ├── newtab
│   ├── savepath
│   ├── smartextract
│   ├── start_project
│   ├── verbose_completion
│   └── zgitinit
├── hidden_aliases.zsh
├── projects
│   ├── boto_project.zsh
│   └── octopus_project.zsh
├── prompt.zsh
├── window.zsh
└── zshrc.symlink

As you can see, there’s a special folder there called projects, in which I put a lll of my project specific setting like tokens, passwords and other things.

For example, here’s what a project file might look like:

export OCTOPUS_POSTGRES_USER=postgres
export OCTOPUS_POSTGRES_PASSWORD=some_password

One thing that is very easy to forget, is that if you open source your dot files (and you should) don’t forget to ignore those files and don’t commit them.