Nested arrays in Bash from a collection of separated array values - arrays

Question

I have multiple projects and one of them is a purposed deployment configuration for setting up multiple repositories, configuring a server structure from files and folders, and finally deploying some services (Docker based).
And with that one project, I want to figure out on how to solve the following situation:
Start with a collection of ( I call this tags)
REPOSITORY_COLLECTION=(
"folder_a:repository_a:branch_a"
"folder_b:repository_b:branch_b"
"folder_c:repository_c:branch_c"
)
folder stands for the source location of where repositories are going to be cloned from Git (I have pairs of repository names separated in different kinds of 'folders')
repository is the name of a repository from Git
branch is the remote branch from Git that is going to be used within the script
So, in order to use the values from within the array, they need to get separated. This is how I've done that:
for collection in ${REPOSITORY_COLLECTION[#]}; do
folder="${collection%%:*}" # only take the first part
result="${collection##"$folder:"}" # remove folder from collection value
repository="${result%%:*}" # only take the second part
branch="${result#"$repository:"}" # only take the third part
# then, add it to new arrays to keep them separated and for the requirement that it is going to be used within the other functionalities of the script
repository_tags+=("$collection")
repository_types+=("$folder")
repositories+=("$repository")
repository_branches+=("$branch")
done
After that, I will need both '$repository_types' and '$repositories' to check if that repository already exists or not. So I need to shape a path; but if I'm not wrong, it will require me to still compare all separated values with the source of $collection "$repository_tags" to check whether the combination of the two is correct. Values are from the same source array, but are randomly chosen according to each other. So:
for tags in ${repository_tags[#]}; do
for repository_type in ${repository_types[#]}; do
# beginning with the source
source_path="/path_to_server/repositories/$repository_type"
if [ -d "$source_path" ]; then
echo && echo "$source_path exist"
else
echo && echo "$source_path doesn't exist, creating it.."
echo "mkdir -p $source_path"
mkdir -p $source_path
fi
for repository in ${repositories[#]}; do
if [[ "$tags" == "$repository_type"* ]] && [[ "$tags" == *"$repository"* ]]; then
# adding the repository value to it, and check if it exists
if [ ! -d "$source_path/$repository" ]; then
# clone from Git
echo "Source '$source_path': Ready to clone $repository"
else
# pull changes from Git
echo "Source '$source_path': Ready to pull changes from $repository"
fi
fi
done
done
done
According to the result when running this:
/path_to_server/repositories/folder_a doesn't exist, creating it..
mkdir -p /path_to_server/repositories/folder_a
Source '/path_to_server/repositories/folder_a': Ready to clone repository_a
/path_to_server/repositories/folder_b doesn't exist, creating it..
mkdir -p /path_to_server/repositories/folder_b
/path_to_server/repositories/folder_c doesn't exist, creating it..
mkdir -p /path_to_server/repositories/folder_c
/path_to_server/repositories/folder_a exist
/path_to_server/repositories/folder_b exist
Source '/path_to_server/repositories/folder_b': Ready to clone repository_b
/path_to_server/repositories/folder_c exist
/path_to_server/repositories/folder_a exist
/path_to_server/repositories/folder_b exist
/path_to_server/repositories/folder_c exist
Source '/path_to_server/repositories/folder_c': Ready to clone repository_c
I like and want the first lines to repeat for every other values such as this;
/path_to_server/repositories/folder_a doesn't exist, creating it..
mkdir -p /path_to_server/repositories/folder_a
Source '/path_to_server/repositories/folder_a': Ready to clone repository_a
Does anyone know what I can do better in this situation, or on how this can be solved?

Answer 1

IFS=: read -r folder repo branch <<< "$collection"
is the simpler way to split a string on colons and assign the fields to variables.
Beyond that, I don't follow what you're doing at all. You may have 1 or more repositories in each folder, and you may have 1 or more branches in each repository. It smells like you need to switch to a language that can do arbitrarily deeply nested data structures.