Prat: PRogrammers Automation Tools

This is a Powershell-based toolkit for a programmer's development environment. Specifically mine, but I want to make it available to others. It has these features:

• One environment for many projects. Ideally, we don't allow projects to modify global environment variables, and we don't accept having to create a separate "enlistment window". Instead, we capture each project's environment for use when interacting with it.
• Dev loop: Standardize your dev loop for any project you work on, using a 'build/unit-test/deploy' loop (aliases b, t, d). See Start-CodebaseDevloop (alias x).
• The Installers module for doing 'deploy' work. The goal is for deployment to be very quick (and quiet) when most/all steps have no work to do. This is achieved by every step having a quick test of some kind, and using an OnChange notifier.
• The TextFileEditor module: This is used to automate deployment of edits/updates to configuration files.

Installation

You shouldn't blindly trust scripts from the internet! First consider:

1. if you trust this repo
2. if your workflow will be disrupted by the customizations it makes. This script will:
   • install various things (e.g. git, a sudo implementation, Pester)
   • invoke its build/test/deploy loop, unless you add the -SkipDeployStep switch. See Deploy-Prat.ps1for the things that can install.
   • in particular, it will install a Powershell profile.ps1. If you already have one, it will back it up to "profile.original.prat.ps1", but you'll need to integrate manually with however you install/maintain your profile. See 'Customization' below for more.

When ready to install

From a regular (non-elevated) Powershell window:

  curl.exe -L -o $env:temp\Install-Prat.ps1 https://github.com/AndrewGodfrey/prat/raw/main/lib/Install-Prat.ps1; Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned -Force; . $env:temp\Install-Prat.ps1

Customization

• You can override the profile, see lib/profile/profilePicker.ps1. You can either control when to invoke interactiveProfile.ps1, or skip it entirely to pick-and-choose things from Prat.
• I haven't (yet) made it easy to avoid updating profile.ps1 (aside from the -SkipDeployStep option on Install-Prat.ps1). The reason is, the "one environment for many projects" goal means that Prat needs to defend against projects like 'conda' which edit your profile.ps1 to change your global environment.
• See Installers.psd1 for other tools you may find useful. e.g. Install-CustomBrowserHomePage generates a home-page with search boxes and links; there are example input files in lib\installers\example.