SetEn - The Setup Engine

For those like me that never heard of Ansible or Terraform

A collection of install and setup scripts, tailored for my personal use and hopefully useful to others. Heavily geared towards configuring Ubuntu Desktops and Laptops after its installation.

Perfect for automatically installing and configuring software that:

• Has installation steps beyond the basicapt install, so you don't have to remember what is its standard way:

  • Does it have an official PPA? Which one?
  • Using a language-specific installer, such as pip, cargo or npm?
  • Is it a vendor repository to be added to at sources.list.d/? GPG Keys?
  • Built from source? Ok, but wget -O- ... | tar x ... or git clone ...? Then ./configure && make && make install or cmake?
  • You get the idea: every time you see “Installation Instructions” in a software's website or GitHub page, save those instructions as a setup script.

• You have lots of settings you want to customize, and it is tedious and not reproducible to do so using its GUI. Be it a simple Gnome app such as Gedit and Nautilus, or your complex NGINX reverse proxying to Apache setup.

---

To get started:

• Run this to bootstrap the setup environment:

bash <(wget -qO- https://github.com/MestreLion/seten/raw/main/bootstrap.sh)

• Run the setup scripts you want: seten <name>.install. You can directly run the installers too!

• Have fun!

See the available installers for more information. The libraries might be worth taking a look too.

---

FAQ

Questions no one really ever asked, but serve as a self-reminder of some of my design decisions

• Why all the environment variables are prefixed as SETUP_ and not SETEN_?

  • Historical reasons. Before being an independent project, Seten was merely a setup/ subdirectory of my personal scripts, hence the prefix. I'm too lazy for a mass-rename that will produce a noisy git diff for little gain, since all but one of these vars are only used internally, or maybe referenced in the config file, but not as actual environment variables.

• What about SETEN_CONFIG?

  • See the “all but one” in the above answer? Well, that exception is SETEN_CONFIG, the path of the config file. Being the only setting that cannot be set in the config file, by definition, it must be set as an environmental variable, possibly in ~/.profile. As such it had to be properly prefixed with an easily recognizable, distinguished namespace.