I've found recently that Makefiles are my best friend for this kind of thing, even if it's just wrapping existing commands with the right arguments and conventions for the project.

Being able to do a simple `make build`, instead of remembering all the right command syntax, repositories etc is so much nicer that having to trawl through a README in a couple of months time for how I was using this thing

+1 I've been using makefiles more and more. And the nice thing is, if you don't have hidden dependencies you can just do a make -jn and get parallelism.

I also like having a script per project that will get auto loaded when you cd in. An example from a current project:

  #my vimrc knows what to do with this
  export VIM_TAGFILES="$PWD/build/tags,$HOME/.local/var/tags/system,$HOME/.local/var/tags/glib-2.0"
  export CFLAGS=' -g -O0 '

  function autobuild {
    (mkdir -p build
      cd build
      while true; do
        make
        make deploy
        inotifywait -qr -e close_write,delete ../cgi ../test ../Makefile.am ../migrate.sql;
    done)
  }

  function watch {
    tail -f build/app.log build/deploy/app.log
  }

Over time they'll end up with a bunch of other random things. I've tried abstracting a lot of these to their own scripts but every project proves just different enough to make that more complicated. And most of them are personalized enough that they don't go into the project itself.

Another "super power" for shell scripts is writing completion scripts (https://iridakos.com/programming/2018/03/01/bash-programmabl...). I've had some insanely useful one's do things like look up database values to mimic a large complicated third party product, going through it's UI inputting repetitive info, copying files around, etc was reduced to fake-tool<tab><tab><tab><tab>.

You may find prm useful for this purpose, it lets you create projects with start/stop scripts that get executed when you do `prm start project` or `prm stop project`. I use it to quickly switch to the right directories, open editors, services, etc. needed by a project.

1. https://github.com/EivindArvesen/prm

`direnv` will automatically activate and deactivate a project-specific shell env for you when you change directories.

I like to put scripts for the project in a `bin/` directory then use direnv to put the project's `bin/` on PATH.

I've leaned more and more towards mirroring the *nix directory structure in my projects. `etc/` and `bin/` are two top-level folders in a lot of my projects at work.