Course/Customizing Your Terminal/Persistent Aliases & PATH

Persistent Aliases & PATH

Learn how to make aliases and PATH changes permanent by adding them to config files.

In earlier lessons, you learned to create aliases with alias name='command' and modify your PATH with export PATH="/new/path:$PATH". But those changes vanish the moment you close the terminal. To make them permanent, you need to add them to your shell config file.

The process is straightforward: open your config file (~/.bashrc for Bash or ~/.zshrc for Zsh) in a text editor, add your alias or export line, save the file, and then either restart your terminal or run source ~/.bashrc (or source ~/.zshrc) to reload it.

# Step 1: Open the file in your editor
nano ~/.bashrc        # or: code ~/.bashrc, vim ~/.bashrc

# Step 2: Add your aliases and PATH entries
alias projects="cd ~/projects"
alias serve="python3 -m http.server"
export PATH="$HOME/.npm-global/bin:$PATH"

# Step 3: Save and reload
source ~/.bashrc

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Keep your config file organized. Group aliases together, PATH entries together, and add comments explaining what each section does. Future-you will thank present-you.

A common best practice is to separate your customizations into their own file and source it from your main config. For example, you might create ~/.bash_aliases for all your aliases and add source ~/.bash_aliases to your .bashrc. This keeps things clean and modular.

# In ~/.bashrc — source a separate aliases file
if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
    source ~/.bash_aliases
fi

When adding to PATH, order matters. Directories listed first take priority. If you have a custom version of a tool in ~/.local/bin, putting it at the front of PATH ensures your version runs instead of the system default.

# Your custom tools take priority over system defaults
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

# Append instead (system tools take priority)
export PATH="$PATH:/opt/new-tool/bin"

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Be careful not to overwrite PATH entirely. Always include $PATH in your export so you don't lose access to essential system commands. Writing export PATH="/my/dir" without $PATH would make most commands stop working.

In our simulated terminal, we can't edit files with a text editor, but we can examine a .bashrc to see how these entries look in practice. Use cat to view the config file below.

cat .bashrc

Practice