Setting up zsh on an HPC environment

Setting up zsh on an HPC environment

I have zsh set up locally, but my production code runs in an HPC environment.

There’s an argument that you should set up your environment in a way that makes it as easy to use as possible. I’ve already set up tooling like zsh and warp locally, but the production environment is a bit of pain to use.

So, I finally, at long last, set up zsh on the HPC environment.

This is annoying to do and I’ll likely forget how to do it again, so I’m writing this down to save future Mark the trouble.

The first step is installing zsh on the HPC environment from source (since you don’t have root access on the HPC environment). This StackOverflow post was very helpful, and I just needed to copy and paste the commands of the top-rated answer.

Once that was set up, I needed to switch from the default bash shell to zsh. This StackOverflow post was also very helpful.

Finally, I needed to get this to work on startup, so that whenever I connected to the remote environment from my IDE, the default shell would be zsh. To do this, I added the following to my ~/.bash_profile file (courtesy of Claude):

# Only source bashrc if we're actually in bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
    # Get the aliases and functions
    if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
        . ~/.bashrc
    fi
fi

# Check if zsh exists and we're not already running it.
# Goal is to run zsh on startup instead of bash
if [ -x "$(command -v zsh)" ] && [ "$SHELL" != "$(command -v zsh)" ]; then
    export SHELL="$(command -v zsh)"
    exec zsh -l
fi

Now, whenever I connect to the HPC environment, it starts using zsh instead of bash. I personally find zsh to be much easier to use, since it includes helpful features like syntax highlighting, auto-completion, and a bunch of other stuff.