Let’s get this out of the way: I love tmux. Gaining the ability to multi-task within the terminal was a monumental productivity boost for me, and if you’ve used it in the past, you probably have similar stories about how it leveled up your workflow. It’s fast, it’s well-supported, and it has a plethora of features you can invoke with just a few keystrokes.
…and personally, I can only remember about a dozen of them.
Recently, I found myself in a position that developers often face – setting up a complicated local development environment.
My mission: get 8-10 local services up and running using a variety of technologies to test my code prior to merging to a shared environment. Armed with several outdated READMEs, my terminal, and some dire warnings about which services would likely crash my machine, I dove in.
The following blog is my story of writing scripts that utilize tmux to impose some order on the setup process.