aliason

aliason is a shell tool for managing project-specific shell aliases.

Installation:

go get github.com/bpicolo/aliason

aliason was created primarily out of the desire to have flexible test-running commands across many different repos (e.g. microservices). Task runners like Make have left me dissatisfied because passing arguments to them can be a huge pain, whereas shell aliases get the job done, but aren't portable between projects.

Using aliason

Getting started with aliason is straightforward, simply:

aliason install >> ~/.bash_profile  # or bashrc/other shell source file of choice

and then source that file.

This does two things:

1. adds a cd function that, as an alternative to cd, will cd followed by eval $(aliason env)
2. adds an eval $(aliason env) directly, so creating new shells will also source your env.

These options seemed the most straightforward, but there a couple alternatives. Manually running eval $(aliason env) should pick up the aliases in your current env. There's also proably a valid strategy using PROMPT_COMMAND, and probably any number of other alternatives as well. Anything that runs eval $(aliason env) when desired should do the trick (e.g. a zsh extension or something of that nature).

Declaring aliases

aliason will look for an .aliasonrc file in your current directory. An .aliasonrc file is a simple mapping of alias names to commands in yaml syntax.

ping: echo pong
test: tox

todo

1. Support preserving global aliases when moving between directories (or also support not-overwriting?)
2. Quoting is probably not an entirely sufficient security measure, but it seems to catch accidental-execcing at the least.
3. Tests

Exciting never-been-asked FAQs

aliason is a portmanteau of alias and liason.