bash prompt got reset every time I login

Question

I asked this question some time ago about the shell does not displaying the path. Recently I found out that the .bashrc does not get sourced (and this should be a normal practice?). Currently, the shell command prompt is like this:

-bash-4.3#

after I executed source .bashrc, I am able to obtain my expected shell command prompt:

root@ubuntu2011:~#

where ubuntu2011 is the machine name. How can I make the prompt looks like the latter one every time I login?

p.s. the .bashrc is from: cp /etc/skel/.bashrc ~/.bashrc

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UPDATE: the contents of ~/.profile is as follow:

# ~/.profile: executed by Bourne-compatible login shells.

if [ "$BASH" ]; then
  if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
    . ~/.bashrc
  fi
fi

mesg n

and echo $BASH returns /bin/bash

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UPDATE: Answers of @terdon's questions:

1. How do I login to server?

I use ssh [email protected] to login as root

2. Are those command executed as root?

Yes.

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UPDATE: The output of ls -l ~/.{profile,bashrc,bash_profile,bash_login}:

ls: cannot access /root/.bash_login: No such file or directory
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   63 Dec 24  2012 /root/.bash_profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3637 May 17 17:00 /root/.bashrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  140 Apr 23  2010 /root/.profile

Answer 1

This happens because you are logging in through ssh. It comes down to the differences between login and non-login shells. When you connect via ssh, you run a login interactive shell. As explained in man bash, this sort of shell will:

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-inter‐ active shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes com‐ mands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.

In other words, ~/.bashrc is ignored by default when running login shells. The simple solution is to explicitly source it from one of the files that are read. As you can see above, login shells will first try to read ~/.bash_profile, and if that doesn't exist ~/.bash_login, and if that also doesn't exist, they read ~/.profile. Since you have a ~/.bash_profile file, you will need to add these lines to it:

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
    . ~/.bashrc
fi

Answer 2

Put this in your ~/.profile

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
    . ~/.bashrc
fi