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

Practical Configuration

As a developer writing any kind of software service, you are likely aware of environment variables: shell values that are set like variables in any other programming language. If you are totally unfamiliar with environment variables, skip ahead to the Shell Scripting chapter before returning here.

The modern approach is to use environment variables as the primary way to configure services – they make it easy to specify configuration in container environments, without worrying what the file system inside them looks like.

Most standard Unix environments use environment variables as a means to specify common configuration that’s relevant to many different programs, not just one. For example, environment variables keep track of where the user’s home directory can be found ($HOME), what the current working directory is ($PWD), what shell should be used by default ($SHELL), where to look for the executable files that correspond to commands received...