Zesk Build Tools

Pipeline, build, and operations tools useful for any project written exclusively in bash and works across all major platforms, devices, and operating systems.

• System setup, service management, cron, permissions separations
• Powerful tools for development workflows - automatic documentation for Bash scripts and functions, completions, and interactivity

This code toolkit depends solely on bash and a few other binaries (jq, sed) and a conscientious decision has been made to not depend on any other language libraries, as of 2026 support for Bash 3 and 4 remains stable.

This toolkit assumes:

• Sources from this project are installed at ./bin/build/ in your project (required)
• Bash code files end with .sh
• Release notes are located in a dedicated subdirectory (can be configured per-project), using markdown .md ( required) and named v1.0.0.md which match version names (v1.0.0) (required)

To use in your project:

• copy bin/build/install-bin-build.sh into your project (changing last line as needed) or use installInstallBuild to install the installation script (to be clear — installs install-bin-build.sh into your project with the correct path setup to your project root).
• Run the installer it before you need this code (will be installed at ./bin/build)
• source bin/build/tools.sh to load the library and use any function defined

To install it in the operating system:

• Copy bin/build/install-bin-build.sh to /usr/local/bin/build/ and sudo /usr/local/bin/build/install-bin-build.sh
• Source /usr/local/bin/build/tools.sh in your scripts to get access to all functions

Main entry points

• bin/build/tools.sh - The only include required for all build tools functions, also can be used as tools.sh identicalCheck ...

Project structure

Zesk Build directories in your project structure:

• ./ - Application root (same as buildHome)
• ./bin/build/ - Zesk Build installation location (may not be changed)
• ./bin/hooks/ - Application hook implementation (hook-name with .sh on the end)
• ./bin/env/ - Your project's environment variables defaults (NAME with .sh on the end if you use buildEnvironmentLoad or buildEnvironmentGet)
• ./docs/release/v1.0.0.md - Release notes (override path by adding BUILD_RELEASE_NOTES environment)

Internally Zesk Build is organized:

• bin/build/env/*.sh - All external environment variables are referenced here. Projects should override default behavior with ./bin/env/*.sh files.
• bin/build/tools/*.sh - Build tools function implementations and template files (.md files)
• bin/build/hooks/*.sh - All default hooks are here - if your application does not implement them - these are used.

Requirements

Requires:

• jq - Parsing JSON files, some formatting
• bc - Floating-point math
• curl or wget - Remote installation

Optional:

• shellcheck - bash linting code
• pcregrep - documentation generation and support
• unzip - awsInstall

Simple Zesk Build Loaders

As a shortcut to running functions:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
"${BASH_SOURCE[0]%/*}/../bin/build/tools.sh" decorate orange "The code is working."

To load all functions:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# shellcheck source=/dev/null
if source "${BASH_SOURCE[0]%/*}/../bin/build/tools.sh"; then 
    decorate orange "The code is working."
    bigText "Hooray."
else
    printf -- "%s\n" "No tools.sh" 1>&2 && false
fi

For more complex (and more robust error handling) see __install and __tools code in bin/build/identical.

Run tests in docker

Scripts support loading one or more environment files and running commands directly in a test container:

bin/build/bitbucket-container.sh --env-file .env.MYTESTENV bin/test.sh

Known issues and workarounds

• On Mac OS X the Docker environment thinks non-executable files are executable, notably bin/build/README.md is considered [ -x $file ] when you are inside the container when the directory is mapped from the operating system. If it's a non-mapped directory, it works fine. Seems to be a bug in how permissions are translated, I assume. Workaround falls back to ls which is slow but works. See isExecutable. Added 2024-01.

Copyright © 2026

All copyrights held by Market Acumen, Inc., a provider of infrastructure and cloud expertise.

License is MIT License. Source can be found online at GitHub.

Reviewed: 2026-01-05