Do your co-workers snicker at your sentence-length shell aliases? I’m here to tell you it’s okay because my aliases border on the Dostoyevskian, too.
Some commands you do a thousand times a day. They deserve super-short aliases:
alias be="bundle exec"
alias s="bundle exec rspec"
alias cuc="bundle exec cucumber"
Like h() or t() in Rails, the more often you invoke a command, the more acceptable it becomes to have a short, cryptic alias.
However, there’s a class of commands I find myself running about 1-20 times a day: interacting with our staging and production environments on Heroku:
# Heroku staging
alias staging='heroku run console --remote staging'
alias staging-process='watch heroku ps --remote staging'
alias staging-releases='heroku releases --remote staging'
alias staging-tail='heroku logs --tail --remote staging'
# Heroku production
alias production='heroku run console --remote production'
alias production-process='watch bundle exec heroku ps --remote production'
alias production-releases='heroku releases --remote production'
alias production-tail='heroku logs --tail --remote production'
# Heroku databases
alias db-pull-staging='heroku db:pull --remote staging --confirm `basename $PWD`-staging'
alias db-pull-production='heroku db:pull --remote production --confirm `basename $PWD`-production'
alias db-copy-production-to-staging='heroku pgbackups:restore DATABASE `heroku pgbackups:url --remote production` --remote staging --confirm `basename $PWD`-staging'
alias db-backup-production='heroku pgbackups:capture --remote production'
alias db-backups='heroku pgbackups --remote production'
Here’s where Neckbeard next to you silently pities your Fisher-Price programming style. What self-respecting programmer would type all that?!
Well, through the magic of autocompletion, you never type more than a few characters for each command. They might look goofy, but they’re memorable.
If you’d like these aliases and other goodies, they’re packaged up in our dotfiles.
Then, the next time you feel your pair programming partner smirking over your shoulder, just tell ‘em: “I learned to alias shell commands with Hooked on Phonics!”
