What is the best way to migrate a .bash_profile to Mavericks I have a pretty extensive .bash_profile set up on my older machine using Lion and I would like to include a lot of the same functionality. I noticed that Mavericks doesn't have a .bash_profile by default.

What is the best practice here?

.bashrc
.bash_profile
.profile


Should I just create the file, should it be picked up automatically or is there anything else to configure?

Note: This is just for a single user account, so it doesn't have to be set up globally.
Go right ahead and put your old .bash_profile file in your home directory and it will get read.

For your purposes .bash_profile, .bash_login and .profile are identical with the exception that one and only one will be read - the first one found of the three with bash searching in that order.

.bashrc is only read when you run an interactive shell that is not a login shell.