I was browsing through the source code of Tom Christie’s typesystem1 library and discovered that the shell scripts2 of the project don’t have any extensions attached to them. At first, I found it odd, and then it all started to make sense.

Executable scripts can be written in any language and the users don’t need to care about that. Also, not gonna lie, it looks cleaner this way.

GitHub uses this [pattern]3 successfully to normalize their scripts. According to the pattern, every project should have a folder named scripts with a subset or superset of the following files:

  • script/bootstrap – installs/updates all dependencies
  • script/setup – sets up a project to be used for the first time
  • script/update – updates a project to run at its current version
  • script/server – starts app
  • script/test – runs tests
  • script/cibuild – invoked by continuous integration servers to run tests
  • script/console – opens a console

  1. typesystem ↩︎

  2. Scripts without extension ↩︎

  3. Scripts to rule them all - GitHub Blog ↩︎

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