Question

I frequently (more than once a week) create new ‘projects’ on my development machine (Mac). I’m trying to streamline the workflow and automate what I do manually now:

1. Create a project folder structure (I have a template directory structure which I copy)
2. Clone (Mercurial) a boilerplate source code baseline into the newly created folder structure
3. Clone another (Mercurial) repository as a sub-repository of the above baseline repository
4. Modify .hgsub config file (Mercurial) to set up sub-repository
5. Modify hgrc config file (Mercurial) to set up default push folder
6. Do an initial commit (Mercurial)
7. Create a series of aliases in my bash_profile

What’s the best (or easiest) way to script the above workflow? I’d like to pass a couple of parameters such as project name, and sub-repository name, etc.

Is this something that I can easily to in a shell script? Automator? Python script?

Thanks.

Prembo.

Answer 1

The steps in your manual workflow can become the steps in a shell
script quite literally. One difference is that you might use sed to
modify files rather than open them in an editor. You’d use positional
parameters or getopts to pass in your parameters. See man bash for
information on those. Then come back and ask specific focused
questions.

— Dennis Williamson