Dotloy

Introduction

This is a tool for my own personal use for deploying my dotfiles

Usage

Config file is specified in yaml. If not specified it will look for it at <cwd>/dotloy.yaml

Template expansion

Preprocessing is done on all files that end with .in. Variables other than the default can be defined by setting the variables in the config for that file.

The template syntax is similar to handlebars, that is {{ var }} will expand to whatever var is set to. Namespaces are done with ..

Toplevel variables

• cwd: Directory in which the config file resides
• config.: Namespace for variables defined at the toplevel of the config
• target.: Namespace for variables defined on each target
• xdg.: Namespace for xdg standard paths
  • home: Home directory
  • config: Top level config dir, same on linux as local.config but on windows it uses /Roaming rather than /Local
  • exec: Local executable file directory. Note: Currently only available on Linux
  • local.: Namespace for local xdg paths
    • config: Config path, only differs on windows

Hard/Soft linking

Linking can be done by setting the to variable on the path. Files are hard-linked by default while directories are soft-linked. This can be changed by setting link_type to soft or hard (hard is invalid for directories).

Example usage

Say I have a config file for my zsh and I want to break it up into different files, one for aliases, one for env variables, etc. I don't want to have to deploy all of these files to my zsh root so instead I source them from zshrc. In order to make this not dependent of the location of the dotfiles dir I use templates:

config file:

variables:
  loaddir: "{{ cwd }}"
targets:
  - from: zshrc.in
    to: "{{ xdg.home }}/.zshrc"

zshrc.in:

source {{ config.loaddir }}/aliases
source {{ config.loaddir }}/env

Then we can just run dotloy deploy in the directory and it will expand the templates in zshrc.in and then copy the result to whatever the home directory is on the current os.