Features

There are a lot of well known projects, and hidden gems, which aid in your productivity; this project aims to install the best of them to make life a little easier.

1. For everybody
   1. Dynamically allocated swap space
   2. Compressed swap
   3. File backup & restore between rebuilds
2. For command line users
   1. Terminator
   2. Fonts
   3. CDPATH
   4. Oh My Zsh
   5. Zim
   6. Starship Prompt
   7. Zoxide
   8. Generic Colouriser
   9. fzf
   10. LSD (LSDeluxe)
   11. HTTPie
   12. The Silver Searcher
   13. Tree
   14. Jq
   15. fd
   16. sd
   17. bat
   18. htop
   19. Glances
   20. Btop++
   21. lnav
   22. duf
   23. dust
   24. procs
3. For GUI desktop users
   1. Pre-pinned applications
   2. Choice of dock position
   3. Seahorse
4. For developers
   1. IntelliJ IDEA IDE
      1. IntelliJ plugins
   2. Visual Studio Code
   3. EditorConfig
   4. Git aliases
   5. Git-GUI
   6. Gitk
   7. Meld
   8. Git Credential Manager
   9. GitHub CLI
   10. Git Interactive Rebase Tool
   11. Postman
5. For containerized development
   1. Docker
   2. ctop
   3. dive
   4. Kubernetes
   5. Minikube
   6. Helm
   7. Kompose
6. For Java developers
   1. Open JDK
   2. Maven
   3. IntelliJ IDEA plugins
   4. IntelliJ code style
   5. IntelliJ inspection profile
   6. SDKMAN!
7. For Node.js developers
   1. Node.js runtime
   2. Pre-installed global packages
   3. IDE support
   4. IntelliJ code style
8. For Python developers
   1. Pyenv version manager
   2. Pipenv package manager
   3. Python plugin for Visual Studio Code
   4. Python plugin for IntelliJ IDEA
9. For Ansible developers
   1. Molecule Wrapper Zsh support

For everybody

Dynamically allocated swap space

Website: https://github.com/Tookmund/Swapspace

Swapspace is a dynamic swap manager for Linux. It dynamically allocates file based swap space to provide virtual memory when needed.

Compressed swap

Website: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt

Zswap is a kernel feature that provides a compressed RAM cache for swap pages.

Unless you have 16GB of RAM you’re probably going to struggle to run VirtualBox, your IDE, a Maven build, your application, and a few services in Docker at the same time.

Enabling swap compression in the virtual machine allows you to run more things at once before swap I/O performance becomes an issue.

File backup & restore between rebuilds

Website: https://rsync.samba.org

One of the advantages of using a virtual machine is it’s easy to get back to a clean working state by rebuilding the virtual machine.

However, you want to keep your user-specific setup, and your workspace with all the repositories you’ve cloned.

This project uses rsync to backup selected files and folders from the client virtual machine to a separate persistent virtual disk on the host machine.

When the virtual machine is rebuilt, these files and folders are copied back to the new client virtual machine.

The following are some of the files and folders backed-up by default:

• /home/dev/workspace/

  • Put all your projects here
• /home/dev/.gitconfig
• /home/dev/.ssh/ (except the authorized_keys file)
• /home/dev/.gnupg/
• /home/dev/.m2/ (except the repository and wrapper directories)

Caution: the followings directories are excluded from the backup by default: .bin, .molecule, .tmp, bin, build, node_modules, target.

Note: you can find your backup under: /var/persistent/home/dev/.

Notice: we accept no responsibility for files lost due to a failure of the backup/restore process. We recommend you push your work to your source control server before rebuilding your virtual machine. We also recommend you manually backup important keys and certificates (e.g. SSH, GPG, X.509) on your host machine.

For command line users

Terminator

Website: http://gnometerminator.blogspot.co.uk/p/introduction.html

A highly customizable terminal emulator that supports splitting the screen into grids of separate console windows (as well as supporting multiple tabs).

Tip: right click on the window to bring up the menu to split the screen or open a new tab.

Fonts

NotoColorEmoji: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji

JetBrainsMono Nerd Font: https://www.nerdfonts.com

Many modern command line tools output emojis so we’ve included NotoColorEmoji to display those characters. Starship prompt and LSD also require a Nerd Font to display correctly, so we’ve included JetBrainsMono Nerd Font.

CDPATH

Website: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Intro/intro_13.html

This environment variable changes how tab completion and the cd command works.

We’ve added the /home/dev/workspace directory to CDPATH; this enables you to cd into any sub-directory of /home/dev/workspace from any directory in the file system.

For example:

# Create a directory under /home/dev/workspace
mkdir -p /home/dev/workspace/my-awesome-project

# Change directory somewhere else
cd /etc

# Use tab completion (from /etc)
cd my-awe<TAB>

# Change directory to my-awesome-project (from /etc)
cd my-awesome-project

# Check you're in the right directory
pwd
/home/dev/workspace/my-awesome-project

This makes it really quick and easy to access your project directories.

Oh My Zsh

Website: http://ohmyz.sh

Rather than a specific command, Oh My Zsh changes your default shell from bash to zsh, and customizes the zsh shell.

Oh My Zsh gives you:

• Better tab completion (like expanding partial names in path).
• Themes to enhance your command prompt (like showing the current git branch).
• Plugins to enable command specific tab completion (e.g. mvn and git).

Try this:

cat /u/s/a/vim<TAB>

# Expands to:
cat /usr/share/applications/vim.desktop

Tip: tab-completion for command options often only works after you’ve specified the -. For example grep TAB produces no suggestions, but grep - TAB produces 160 suggestions.

Zim

Website: https://zimfw.sh

Oh My Zsh has a wide selection of plugins, but sometimes you want to install plugins from elsewhere. This is where Zim comes in, Zim is a plugin manager for Zsh and can install Zsh plugins from Git repositories.

You can find a list of third-party plugins at: https://github.com/unixorn/awesome-zsh-plugins/blob/main/README.md

Starship Prompt

Website: https://starship.rs

A fast command line prompt with lots of features.

Zoxide

Website: https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide

Easily cd into directories you’ve previously visited. Run zi so see a searchable list of previous directories.

Generic Colouriser

Website: https://github.com/garabik/grc

Colorizes the output of several common command line tools.

fzf

Website: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Command line fuzzy finder.

Integrates in several ways:

• Reverse shell history search CTRL-R
• Find files or directories e.g. cd **<TAB>
• Complete process IDs e.g. kill -9 **<TAB>

fzf-tab is used to integrate fzf with Zsh tab completion.

LSD (LSDeluxe)

Website: https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd

A ls replacement with more colorful output filetype icons. A Zsh alias is used to invoke lsd when running ls.

HTTPie

Website: https://httpie.org

HTTPie is a command line HTTP client. HTTPie is somewhat like cURL or Wget, but designed more for interactive use than use in shell scripting. It has a more intuitive command line interface, JSON support and syntax highlighting.

The Silver Searcher

Website: http://geoff.greer.fm/ag

If you’ve used Linux you’ve almost certainly used grep, but you’ve probably never heard of ag (The Silver Searcher).

While grep is a great general purpose tool, ag is a specific tool for finding matching text in a directory tree and outputting the results in a human readable format.

Below is the output of the command ag java on this project:

Tip: if you have multiple pages of output you may want to use ag --pager=less PATTERN.

Tree

Website: http://mama.indstate.edu/users/ice/tree

The tree command is similar to find . but outputs in a graphical tree format.

Below is the output of the command tree on this project:

Tip: if you have multiple pages of output you may want to use tree -C | less -R.

Jq

Website: https://stedolan.github.io/jq

The jq command would be worth installing just to be able to use it to pretty print JSON in colour, but jq is amazing at manipulating JSON as well.

Tip: to pretty print a JSON file run jq '.' PATH_TO_JSON_FILE.

fd

Website: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

fd is a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find.

It’s much better for the most common use-case (i.e. finding files/directories by name) e.g:

This is obviously easier than find -iname '*molecule*'.

fd is still capable of handling more advanced use-cases as well, e.g. you can specify the type of file or a command to execute.

sd

Website: https://github.com/chmln/sd

A tool for performing find and replace in files/streams from the command line. Simple alternative to sed.

bat

Website: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

bat is a more advanced alternative to cat with support for syntax-highlighting, line numbers, searching and paging.

e.g. running bat ~/.bashrc will give you:

htop

Website: http://hisham.hm/htop

The htop command is essentially a top replacement with a better looking user interface and a few more features.

Glances

Website: https://nicolargo.github.io/glances

The glances application shows a broader view of what’s going on on your system than top or htop provide. In addition to RAM and CPU usage, you can see disk I/O, network I/O and warnings/alerts.

Btop++

Website: https://github.com/aristocratos/btop

Btop++ shows a broad view of the what’s going on on your system in a more graphical style.

lnav

Website: https://lnav.org

A tool for viewing and navigating log files.

duf

Website: https://github.com/muesli/duf

An alternative to df for showing disk usage and free space.

dust

Website: https://github.com/bootandy/dust

A more graphical alternative to du for displaying dusk usage for files and directories.

procs

Website: https://github.com/dalance/procs

An improved alternative to ps with color output and additional features.

For GUI desktop users

Pre-pinned applications

No more fishing through menus to run the applications you use the most. The provisioning script pre-pins selected applications to the dock so they’re ready to use.

Choice of dock position

Each user can choose whether they want the dock bar on the left, right or bottom of the screen.

Examples of left and bottom dock positions

Seahorse

Website: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Seahorse

Graphical user interface for managing your keys, and a SSH agent to save you having to put in your SSH password more than once in the same session.

For developers

IntelliJ IDEA IDE

Website: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea

In my opinion IntelliJ IDEA is the best IDE whether you’re working in Java, Python or Node.js (Node.js support requires IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition).

The Community Edition is excellent at what it does but it’s quite limited in support for languages and frameworks. You need to pay for the Ultimate Edition if you want support for common tools/frameworks such as JavaEE and the Spring Framework. The relatively small price for the Ultimate Edition is well worth the money.

By default the Community Edition is installed.

IntelliJ plugins

• Indent Rainbow add color to the indent based on the indent level.
• Rainbow Brackets add color to brackets based on nested pairs.
• String Manipulation case switching, sorting, filtering etc.
• Save Actions - XDEV Edition re-format/clean-up code on save.

• PlantUML integration for drawing diagrams using the PlantUML domain-specific language.

  

Visual Studio Code

Website: https://code.visualstudio.com

Great support for YAML, Markdown, HTML, CSS, LESS, SASS, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Bash and many more.

Core languages have IntelliSense support for smart completion.

The built in debugger is very good and supports several languages.

Has good built-in support for Git; while, it’s missing a few features that you’d expect from a standalone Git client, it covers the normal development workflow.

Tip: click on the branch name in the bottom left corner to change/create branches.

EditorConfig

Website: http://editorconfig.org

EditorConfig is a project that defines a common configuration file supported by many IDEs and text editors (some require a plugin installed).

The EditorConfig configuration file defines the basic editor preferences for particular files and file types (e.g. charset, line endings, indent, trailing whitespace).

This development environment installs the EditorConfig plugin for Visual Studio Code as part of the provisioning; IntelliJ IDEA supports EditorConfig without the need for a plugin.

For an example of an .editorconfig file see the root directory of this project.

Git aliases

Git aliases save you a lot of typing and make it easy to execute more complex Git commands:

• Print the main branch (searches for main, trunk, mainline, default and master)

  git main = git-main-branch (shell script)

• Print the develop branch (searches for dev, devel, development and develop)

  git dev = git-develop-branch (shell script)

• Print the remote HEAD branch

  git rhead = git remote show origin | grep -Po 'HEAD branch: \K.*'

• Print the repository root directory

  git root = git rev-parse --show-toplevel

• Execute a command in the repository root

  git exec = f() { exec "$@"; }; f (shell function)

• View summary lines for recent commits

  git ls ≡ git log --pretty=format:"%C(yellow)%h%Cred%d\ %Creset%s%Cblue\ [%an]" --decorate

• View summary lines and list changed files for recent commits

  git ll ≡ git log --pretty=format:"%C(yellow)%h%Cred%d\ %Creset%s%Cblue\ [%an]" --decorate --numstat

• View summary lines and dates for recent commits

  git lds ≡ git log --pretty=format:"%C(yellow)%h\ %ad%Cred%d\ %Creset%s%Cblue\ [%an]" --decorate --date=short

• View tree of recent commits (all branches)

  git lt ≡ git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all

• Switch to an existing branch

  git sw ≡ git switch

• Create a new branch

  git cb ≡ git switch -c

• Amend the last commit and change the commit message

  git ca ≡ git commit --amend

• Amend the last commit without changing the commit message

  git cane ≡ git commit --amend --no-edit

• Rebase the current branch onto origin/main

  git rom ≡ git fetch -p && git rebase origin/$(git main)

• Rebase the current branch onto origin/develop

  git rod ≡ git fetch -p && git rebase origin/$(git dev)

• Rebase the current branch onto origin/HEAD

  git roh ≡ !git fetch -p && git rebase origin/$(git rhead)

• Push the current branch to origin HEAD

  git po ≡ git push origin HEAD

• Force push the current branch to origin HEAD

  git pof ≡ git push origin HEAD --force

• Switch to the main branch, pull changes and prune remote branches

  git smp ≡ git switch $(git main) && git pull -p

• Switch to the develop branch, pull changes and prune remote branches

  git sdp ≡ git switch $(git dev) && git pull -p

• Switch to the local branch with the same name as the remote head, pull changes and prune remote branches

  git shp ≡ git fetch -p && git switch $(git rhead) && git pull -p

• Pop the most recent stash

  git pop ≡ git stash pop

• List the most recently checked-out branches

  git lb ≡ git reflog show --pretty=format:'%gs ~ %gd' --date=relative | grep 'checkout:' | grep -oE '[^ ]+ ~ .*' | awk -F~ '!seen[$1]++' | head -n 10 | awk -F' ~ HEAD@{' '{printf(" \033[33m%s: \033[37m %s\033[0m\n", substr($2, 1, length($2)-1), $1)}'

• Reformat the recent changes as Markdown release notes

  git release-notes ≡ git log --color --pretty=format:'%s%Cred%d%Creset' --decorate | sed -E 's/(.*) \((\#[0-9]+)\)/* \2: \1/' | tac -

Git-GUI

Website: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-gui

Git-GUI and Gitk (see below) are companion applications that together make the most fully featured open source GUI Git client available for Linux.

Git-GUI is the commit dialog and the UI for performing remote operations.

Generally, I’d advise only using Git-GUI when you need to amend a commit, the rest of the time you’re better off using the commit dialog in your editor/IDE.

Tip: run git gui in your Git working directory to launch Git-GUI.

Gitk

Website: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitk

Gitk and Git-GUI (see above) are companion applications that together make the most fully featured open source GUI Git client available for Linux.

Gitk is the repository/history browser.

As you can see it’s not the prettiest application, but the other options are either not free for commercial use, require registration to download, or lack support for resetting the working branch to a particular commit.

While the built in diff viewer is a bit basic, it supports using Meld (see below) as an external diff viewer.

Tip: run gitk in your Git working directory to launch Gitk.

Gitk and Git-GUI are integrated, so once you’ve run one of the applications, you can launch the other from the menu bar.

Meld

Website: http://meldmerge.org

A GUI diff/merge tool with Git support.

Tip: run meld . in your Git working directory to review your uncommitted changes.

Git Credential Manager

Website: https://github.com/GitCredentialManager/git-credential-manager

Stores credentials for Git version control securely. Useful if you want to write to a Git repository using HTTPS rather than SSH.

GitHub CLI

Website: https://cli.github.com

GitHub CLI is a command line tool that makes it easy to interact with GitHub from the command line.

e.g. Cloning a GitHub repository

gh repo clone Netflix/flamescope
# Equivalent to:
# git clone git@github.com:Netflix/flamescope.git

e.g. Creating a pull request

gh pr create --title 'Pull request title here' --body 'Pull request body here.'

e.g. List issues for current repository

gh issue list

Git Interactive Rebase Tool

Website: https://github.com/MitMaro/git-interactive-rebase-tool

A terminal based sequence editor for Git rebase.

Postman

Website: https://www.getpostman.com

A user friendly tool for testing REST services.

For containerized development

Docker

Website: https://www.docker.com

Solves the problem of handling dependencies and common configuration between development, build, test and production.

When using a Docker image, there’s no more worrying if you have the correct Java/Ruby/Python version installed, or is the JAVA_HOME set to the correct installation; all of that is provided in the Docker image, you just use it.

It’s also easy to build your own Docker images so you can get the same benefits with your own software.

ctop

Website: https://ctop.sh

ctop is the terminal based tool that provides a top like interface for container metrics. View CPU, memory, network I/O, and disk I/O for your Docker containers at a glance from your terminal.

dive

Website: https://github.com/wagoodman/dive

dive is a tool for exploring docker images, layer contents, and discovering ways to shrink Docker images.

Kubernetes

Website: http://kubernetes.io

Kubernetes is the leading solution for managing containerized applications in production.

Docker is great for running containerized applications locally, but you need something more to manage containerized applications across multiple servers. There’s Docker Swarm and Apache Mesos but the most popular solution is Kubernetes.

Kubernetes allows you to deploy services to a cluster of servers, to manage configuration, configure networking, perform rolling updates and much more.

Minikube

Website: https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube

Minikube makes it easy to run a single node Kubernetes cluster in the development environment.

Give it a try by running the following from the terminal:

minikube start
minikube dashboard

Note: because we’re already running inside a VM we’re running Minikube with --vm-driver=none using a Zsh plugin.

Helm

Website: https://helm.sh

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. It makes it easier to use software built for Kubernetes.

Give it a try by running the following from the terminal:

# Start Minikube (if you haven't already)
minikube start

# Initialize helm (if you haven't already)
helm init

# Wait for tiller to be ready
# You can watch the tiller status be ready (1/1) by running:
kubectl get pods -w --namespace kube-system
# terminate with ctrl-c

# Install Apache Tomcat
helm install stable/tomcat

# helm will give the service a name <something>-tomcat
# you can access the tomcat by running:
http "$(minikube service --url <something>-tomcat)"
# You'll get a HTTP 404 response (we haven't provided a
# webarchive), but you'll see it's come from a
# `Apache-Coyote` server.

Kompose

Website: http://kompose.io

Kompose is a conversion tool to go from Docker Compose to Kubernetes.

Give it a try by running the following from the terminal:

# Start Minikube (if you haven't already)
minikube start

# cd into a docker-compose project
# or use wget to download the following example compose file
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/kompose/master/examples/docker-compose-v3.yaml \
  -O docker-compose.yaml

# Bring up your services
kompose up

# Watch your services load
kubectl get pods -w
# terminate with ctrl-c

# Once you're done shutdown the services
kompose down

# Once you're done with the Minikube instance
minikube stop
minikube delete

For Java developers

Open JDK

To get free patches for longer this project uses builds from AdoptOpenJDK.

Maven

Maven 3.9.4 is installed by default.

Note: Gradle is not installed as Gradle users are recommended to use the Gradle Wrapper.

IntelliJ IDEA plugins

• Maven Helper adds the Dependency Analyzer tab to the editor panel for pom.xml files.
• CheckStyle-IDEA for checking the code style of your Java source files.
• Concise AssertJ Optimizing Nitpicker to help you write more concise assertions using AssertJ.
• Log Support 2 code inspections for Slf4j.

IntelliJ code style

GantSign Code Style has support for the following JVM languages:

• Java: based on the Google Java Style Guide
• Kotlin: based on the Kotlin Style Guide

IntelliJ inspection profile

The GantSign Inspection Profile has support for Java and Kotlin. This is a strict inspection profile intended for greenfield code.

SDKMAN!

Website: https://sdkman.io

SDKMAN! is a tool for managing parallel versions of multiple Software Development Kits. It’s similar to RVM but for Java, Groovy, Kotlin, Scala, Maven, Gradle and a bunch of other JVM based SDKs.

To switch Java version in the current shell:

sdk use java 11

To change the default Java version:

sdk default java 11

To install Gradle:

sdk install gradle

To play with GraalVM:

# List available versions
sdk list java

# Install latest GraalVM version
sdk install java 17.0.8-graalce

# Switch to GraalVM in the current shell
sdk use java 17.0.8-graalce

To list all the supported SDKs:

sdk list

For Node.js developers

Node.js runtime

This development environment comes with Node.js v18 installed.

Pre-installed global packages

To provide a better out of the box experience the following global packages come pre-installed.

• Grunt task runner
• Gulp task runner
• npm-check-updates dependency version upgrade tool
• TS Node CLI TypeScript support
• Typings TypeScript definition manager

IDE support

Visual Studio Code comes with excellent support for Node.js, JavaScript and TypeScript.

IntelliJ code style

GantSign Code Style has support for JavaScript based on JavaScript Standard Style.

For Python developers

Pyenv version manager

Website: https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

Pyenv lets you install and switch between multiple versions of Python. Other tools such as Pipenv use Pyenv when they need a version of Python you don’t currently have installed.

Pipenv package manager

Website: https://pipenv.readthedocs.io

Pipenv helps you manage a virtualenv for your projects as well as managing your packages. It will add/remove packages from your Pipfile as you install/uninstall packages. It also generates the Pipfile.lock for deterministic builds.

Python plugin for Visual Studio Code

This development environment comes with Microsoft’s excellent Python plugin for Visual Studio Code: ms-python.python.

Tip: launch Visual Studio Code from your Pipenv shell. This will give Visual Studio Code access to your virtualenv and let it install packages e.g. pylint, autopep8 and rope without needing sudo.

To launch Visual Studio Code from your Pipenv shell run the following commands:

cd your-python-project
pipenv shell
code .

Python plugin for IntelliJ IDEA

Depending whether you’re using the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition or the Ultimate Edition a different plugin will be installed. If you’re using IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition the plugin installed will provide equivalent functionality to PyCharm Community Edition. If you’re using IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition the plugin installed will provide equivalent functionality to PyCharm Professional Edition.

Tip: launch IntelliJ from your Pipenv shell. This will give IntelliJ access to your virtualenv and let it install packages e.g. pylint, autopep8 and rope without needing sudo.

To launch IntelliJ from your Pipenv shell run the following commands:

cd your-python-project
pipenv shell
idea .

For Ansible developers

Molecule Wrapper Zsh support

Website: https://github.com/gantsign/molecule-wrapper

Molecule is an excellent tool to assist you in developing and testing Ansible Roles and Playbooks.

Molecule integrates with Docker to provide an isolated environment to try your provisioning and uses Testinfa to test the results.

Molecule can be tricky to install and that’s where Molecule Wrapper comes in. Molecule Wrapper is a shell script that installs Molecule (and its dependencies) before invoking Molecule.

The Zsh support for Molecule Wrapper adds an alias so you can run ./moleculew with the molecule command and enables tab-completion support.