Search notes:

~/.bash_profile

~/.bash_profile is the personal initialization file that is executed for login shells. (Compare ~/.bashrc)
~/.bash_profile should just load ~/.profile and then ~/.bashrc (in that order).

.bash_profile and .profile

When bash is invoked as a login shell, it tries to read ~/.bash_profile. If it does not exist, it tries to read from ~/.bash_login and if this file does not exist from ~/.profile instead.
Since ~/.bash_login should not exist, the .bash_profile file should include ~/.profile: 
if [ -r ~/.profile ]; then
      . ~/.profile
fi

See also

/etc/profile

Index