Initialize a gitlab project both locally and remotely with a single command

Question

This shell script, with only a few configurations, has the goal of initializing a project on Gitlab.com without having to go through the go through the website's ui.

This means: Let's say you just a project with a few source files, but you haven't done anything with git yet. The goal of this script is to allow you to write something like git-init-remote <my_repository_name> on the command line and have both the project on your personal gitlab.com and the local git repository.

#!/bin/sh

repo=$1
token=<YOUR-PRIVATE-TOKEN> # You get this from https://gitlab.com/-/profile/personal_access_tokens
username=<YOUR-USERNAME>

test -z $repo && echo "Repo name required." 1>&2 && exit 1

curl --request POST --header "Private-Token: $token" --header "Content-Type: application/json" --data "{\"name\":\"$repo\"}" "https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects"

echo "\nDone initializing on remote."
echo "\nCreating local git repository..."

git init
git remote add origin https://gitlab.com/$username/$repo.git
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git push -u origin master

echo "\nDone."

I would like to have any of your thoughts on how this can break and how scalable this can go. I had trouble finding similar scripts on the web so I felt like a had to write here.

Answer 1

Welcome to CodeReview.SE and thanks for submitting your script for a code review!

Good points

• Good output conveying how progress is being made.
• Clear variable names

Suggestions

• Are there limitations for what characters can be in a repo name? If so, you might want to check that before sending it to the API. It is good that you're checking to make sure they passed something in.
• Aside from making sure $1 is set, there is no error checking. If the curl fails do you want to continue with the git commands?
• It isn't clear if you want this to run in bash or POSIX sh. The question is tagged for bash, but your sh-bang line points at POSIX shell. But yay for including the sh-bang line.
• One shell best practice is putting your variable substitutions in double quotes. git remote add origin "https://gitlab.com/$username/$repo.git" shows how to change one of your lines of code. You want the variables inside of double quotes so that spaces in a variable name don't cause the shell to split what you think is one argument into multiple arguments to the command.

Ideas

• Do you really want the token stored in the source code? Can you pull this from a secrets vault or store it in a separate file? If you want to commit your source code to a code repository (like git) it would be much better if it didn't include secret tokens.
• I'd try seeing if I could get this to work as a git subcommand. Here is a medium article on writing your own git subcommands.
• Use shellcheck to get automated best practice suggestions for your shell code. It can also be run locally on the command line.