rustup.rs VS docker-flask-example

Much of the time that people are writing shell scripts, they're writing them not because they prefer shell syntax to that of some other language, but rather because they're creating a script that needs to be widely disseminated/deployed to all sorts of machines with unpredictable install bases.

This is why a large fraction of the shell scripts that exist in the world still hold to Bourne shell syntax, rather than using any of the syntax extensions from its descendant shells — Bourne shell (or at least, something at /bin/sh that interprets Bourne-shell syntax) is part of the POSIX standard. So you can expect any POSIX system — no matter how weird — to be able to run (Bourne) shell scripts. You can run them on Alpine. You can run them on Busybox. You can run them on your NAS. You can run them on your router. You can run them in your initramfs, on your Kubernetes nodes, on your Mosix nodes, whatever.

For an example of the type of script I'm talking about — see e.g. the script you download+run when you run the command-line on https://rustup.rs: https://github.com/hsivonen/rustup.rs/blob/master/rustup-ini...

There's absolutely no benefit that this script gets from being written directly in POSIX-compiliant Bourne shell syntax, rather than being written in something that compiles to it; any more than programs for your PC would benefit from being written directly in ASM rather than in something that compiles to it.

I've been maintaining my Build a SAAS App with Flask video course[0] for 8 years. It has gone from pre-1.0 to 2.3 and has been recorded twice with tons of incremental updates added over the years to keep things current.

In my opinion tutorial creators should pin their versions so that anyone taking the course or going through the tutorial will have a working version that matches the video or written material.

I'm all for keeping things up to date and do update things every few months but rolling updates don't tend to work well for tutorials because sometimes a minor version requires a code change or covering new concepts. As a tutorial consumer it's frustrating when the content doesn't match the source code unless it's nothing but a version bump.

I've held off upgrading Flask to 3.0 and Python 3.12 due to these open issues with 3rd party dependencies https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example/issues/17.

[0]: https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/

I usually end up with project specific "run" scripts which are just shell scripts so I can do things like `./run shell` to drop into the shell of a container, or `./run rails db:migrate` to run a command in a container.

Here's a few project specific examples. They all have similar run scripts:

    - https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example

There's a lot of "tool" selections in that repo.

If anyone is looking for ready to go web app examples aimed at both development and production, I maintain:

    - https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example

Personally I maintain https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example. There's also https://github.com/nickjj/build-a-saas-app-with-flask if you want more opinions.

This is what I do except I use a shell script instead of a Makefile.

A working example of this is at: https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example/blob/912388f3...

Those ./run ci:XXX commands are in: https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example/blob/912388f3...

I like it because if CI ever happens to be down I can still run that shell script locally.

> I've encountered a code written in the 12factor style of using environment variables for configuration, and in that particular case there was no validation nor documentation of the configuration options. Is this typical?

I don't know about typical, it comes down to how your team values the code they write.

You can have a .env.example file commit to version control which explains every option in as much or as little detail as you'd like. For my own personal projects, I tend to document this file like this https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example/blob/main/.en....

I did this for a while but make isn't well suited for this use case. What I end up doing is have a shell script with a bunch of functions in it. Functions automatically becomes a callable a command (with a way to make private functions if you want) with pretty much no boiler plate.

The benefit of this is it's just shell scripting so you can use shell features like $@ to pass args to another command or easily source and deal with env vars.

I've written about this process at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/replacing-make-with-a-shell-s... and an example file is here https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example/blob/main/run.

There's: https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example