Today our /bin folder has become overwhelmed with different development tools and scripts.

We put everything there: local automations, CI/CD helpers, PAAS release scripts, Dockerfile helpers, etc.

It becomes too hard to find appropriate tools for your problem in that mess.

I had several revisions on decomposing the /bin scripts and the whole directory, but I still have not found one solution.

I have played with subfolders /bin/heorku/release and prefixes /bin/ci-setup. Each strategy has pros & cons.

CI/CD is on the way out

But I have found that developers do not use CI/CD scripts locally, which means we could move them out from the /bin.

Exploring some GitHub Actions documentation, I found this neat folder: /.automation. And I got that this what I have looked.

/.automation is an excellent place to hide some ninja scripts which developers would not like to read or maintain.

So, all my last bin/ci-setup will become: .automation/tests/setup. Or if I need to put composed steps for GitHub Actions, I'll have .automation/actions/prepare.yml

References:

Here is a good example: https://github.com/github/super-linter/tree/main/.automation

Paul Keen is an Open Source Contributor and a Chief Technology Officer at JetThoughts. Follow him on LinkedIn or GitHub.

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