Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

By : David Cohen, Christian Sturm
5 (2)
Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

5 (2)
By: David Cohen, Christian Sturm

Overview of this book

Developers are always looking to raise their game to the next level, yet most are completely lost when it comes to the Linux command line. This book is the bridge that will take you to the next level in your software development career. Most of the skills in the book can be immediately put to work to make you a more efficient developer. It’s written specifically for software engineers, not Linux system administrators, so each chapter will equip you with just enough theory to understand what you’re doing before diving into practical commands that you can use in your day-to-day work as a software developer. As you work through the book, you’ll quickly absorb the basics of how Linux works while you get comfortable moving around the command line. Once you’ve got the core skills, you’ll see how to apply them in different contexts that you’ll come across as a software developer: building and working with Docker images, automating boring build tasks with shell scripts, and troubleshooting issues in production environments. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to use Linux and the command line comfortably and apply your newfound skills in your day-to-day work to save time, troubleshoot issues, and be the command-line wizard that your team turns to.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

Configuration files

The next place a program looks for configuration is in its configuration files. Where a program looks for configuration can vary wildly, but there are a few standard places to look.

System-level configuration in /etc/

First, the /etc/ directory is a good place to start. You’ve seen this directory before, in Chapter 5, Introducing Files. /etc/programname – where programname is a stand-in for the name of the program you’re interested in configuring – is a common choice of directory for software to keep system-wide configuration. For many programs, that’s enough. For example, the nginx web server is a system-level program: different users aren’t commonly running their own instances of web servers on a single machine, so a system-wide configuration is all that’s needed.

That said, configuration for large or complex programs can still be broken up inside of the /etc/programname directory. Nginx is a good example...