I recently switched my hosting provider from Digital Ocean to Vultr to get tighter control over the configuration—a more "pure" FreeBSD installation. While updating my notes to prep for the install, I considered how many configuration steps were basic file editing: add this line under that line, uncomment this line, comment that line, etc. I love the simplicity that comes when the code is the documentation, so I decided to create a small file I/O library to make it easier to write shell scripts for system configuration. Why bother maintaining notes to describe manual changes when I could write a script to perform the changes automatically?
I'm definitely not a shell scripting guru, but I thought these libraries could be useful for others as well. I leveraged them to create scripts that perform the full setup and configuration of my host and jail including the database and web server. I've released the libraries as part of a freebsd-scripts project on GitHub along with a couple of simple scripts to back up Apache and the system configs. I also added the portsfetch script, which I use to fetch the quarterly ports tree. I'm sure I'll share more shell scripts over time, so this gives me a single project to group them under. If you use them to create something useful, tell me about it in the comments below.
