Synchronizing environment variables across Workstations

I need to have the configuration for my applications and APIs synchronized across multiple machines.

What’s my situation?

• I use at least two workstations
  • MacBook Pro; for use when out and about
  • ArchLinux Desktop; for use when at home
  • Ubuntu Server; for hosting permanent services

What does this mean?

As I’m working across two devices, I need to make sure that the equivalent configuration is available across both devices and immediately. I use SyncThing as the technology to keep my personal configuration such as environment variables synchronized across all devices. I don’t use Git as there is an extra step of manually pulling down the configuration each time, in addition to as not having access to my local git repository at all times.

Mac & Linux are UNIX-based/like platforms, so I can keep my configuration files uniform. I use Bash scripts to define the environment variables needed for any APIs that I use.

How did I achieve it?

Directory structure & files needed

I use ~/.config/zai as my configuration directory and set SyncThing to watch it, and then set it on the other workstations to point to the same path. A file named rc.sh lives inside here centralize anything I want upon loading the terminal.

Installing SyncThing

Installing on Linux

Luckily for most Linux distributions, SyncThing is already provided in the pre-installed repositories.

pacman -S syncthing # Arch Linux
apt install syncthing # Debian / Ubuntu

# Enable & Start Syncthing
systemctl enable --now syncthing@<username>

Installing on macOS

On Mac it’s slightly more trivial, but the instructions are provided within the Downloadable ZIP File for macOS.

Sourcing the rc.sh from the shell

The following snippet needs to be placed in a shell initialization script which may differ depending on platform. The source command tells Bash to reference (and execute) the file that follows it

source ~/.config/zai/rc.sh

macOS

macOS will execute the ~/.bash_profile script upon opening a new Bash shell. I switch between zsh and bash from time to time, so either I manually execute /usr/bin/bash to take me to the Bash environment, or I’d just change the default shell under the Terminal properties.

Linux

Most linux platforms will execute ~/.bashrc upon opening a new shell, assuming that Bash is the default shell.

rc.sh

I keep this file simple, which is to loop through all the files inside the env/ subdirectory for bash files and execute them. This allows me to not have a single file with numerous lines.

for file in ~/.config/zai/env/*.sh; do
    source $file;
done

What’s next?

I’m diving into the world of DevOps, and will need to configure my local systems to;

• Hold the API Credentials for the cloud service(s) of my choice
• Hold the API Credentials for an S3 bucket location of my choice