Estragon

Estragon is a personal environment configuration program with emphasis on simplicity and flexibility. It will keep track of your packages and sort out your dotfiles so you can feel at home anywhere with one command.

Why Estragon?

Tools like Ansible are extremely powerful, as those tools are made to command fleets of computers to perform complex tasks. But with power comes complexity; playbooks and role-based dotfile configurations can get very dense and are difficult to get started with compared to dedicated dotfile managers because the scope of Ansible and similar tools is so large.

On the other hand, dedicated dotfile managers are often too simplistic for getting an environment set up from scratch. Instead, they focus on managing just the files in your home directory and subdirectories, and not worrying about the dependencies that those configurations have or files that live outside of your home directory such as device configurations. Shells, programmable text editors, window managers, and desktop environments often have configurations that rely on something being installed beyond the base software that's being configured directly.

Estragon provides a middle ground by being a powerful dotfile manager and a simple package manager wrapped all into one executable. Different dotfile configurations can be managed in different ways, and different programs can be installed with different packages in different environments.

Using Estragon

Estragon requires an environment string and an estragon.yaml configuration file in the directory to install your packages and dotfiles. These are covered in detail in their respective sections.

You can run estragon help to get more information about the subcommands and the flags you can pass.

Environment String

Estragon makes decisions based off of an environment string that's passed on the initial run of the program with the --env flag. After this, the environment string can be specified again in the command line, but you don't have to as Estragon stores it in a directory in the same directory as your estragon.yaml. You can pass a new environment string at it will replace the one already associated with the directory.

The environment string is a series of fields that are space-separated. Some settings in estragon.yaml make use of these fields to decide what values to use. The environment string is matched against a series of space-separated fields which the environment string must match all of, or it will not match. The fields can use Go regular expressions, and some of the keys may even be able to use the submatches when generating their values (in which case, dollar signs are used and so literal dollar signs must be escaped with a double dollar sign). An empty string is a wildcard and will match anything. If there are multiple matches and one is the empty string wildcard, the non-wildcard match will take precedence. If multiple non-wildcard matches exist, it is not guaranteed which match will take precedence so take advantage of

Note that while these examples made use of field and field:value styled fields, there is no restriction on what text can go in a field other than that spaces are not allowed. You can format your fields however you want.

For example:

"debian version:(.+) graphics-driver:(.+)": "driver-$2-$1"

This key will match any of the below environment strings:

debian version:stretch graphics-driver:gpu
version:buzz debian graphics-driver:company
laptop debian work version:jessie graphics-driver:cpu desktop:gnome

Notice that the order does not matter, and that only the fields specified are checked. Respectively, the output string would be driver-gpu-stretch, driver-company-buzz, and driver-cpu-jessie due to the $1 and $2 being replaced by the first and second submatch in the key string.

Negating the Environment String

If you want a certain combination of fields to cause a key to not match, you can separate the positive fields from negative false fields with a lone exclamation mark (!). For example, a key of windows.* laptop ! windows8 work will match all environment strings that have any field that starts with windows and has the field laptop, but will fail if that field happens to be windows8 and the environment has the field work.

Note that the phrasing was "and the environment has the field". If we wanted the match to fail on either windows8 or work, we could change the key to windows.* laptop ! windows8|work, which replaces the multiple conditions with just a regular expression. Regular expression submatches are only considered in the non-negated portions of the key, meaning submatches after the ! are thrown out.

All lone exclamation marks after the first are ignored.

Environment Variables

Some configurations in the estragon.yaml file are able to use environment variables. There are circumstances where an environment variable could be bound differently for every computer you work on. You could bind those variables in your shell config, but what if you don't have one? Or if you don't want to populate the config with those values or branches and don't want to make copies of the files with minor differences? You could run VARNAME=VALUE estragon ... every time you need to use it, but there is a better solution to this.

Estragon allows you to bind environment variables that will only be active when you run Estragon with that directory with the envvar subcommand. Just the name of a variable will print the value of that variable. Variables can be assigned values by separating the key and the value with an equal sign (=). Variables can be removed by appending a minus (-) to the name.

For example:

$ estragon envvar abc

$ estragon envvar abc=def
$ estragon envvar abc
def
$ estragon envvar abc-
$ estragon envvar abc

The last line in the example is empty indicating that the value was removed so it doesn't print a value.

An example of where this is useful is files in Firefox profiles like userChrome.css. The names Firefox makes for the profile folders are somewhat random and change on every machine, so this allows you to set this for every machine without bogging up your shell configuration or having to run the command with VARNAME=VALUE estragon ... every time.

Instead, you can put the path to the config including the per-machine variable in the rule value, and as long as that variable is set (by Estragon or otherwise), it will work as expected.

estragon.yaml Config File Schema

For Estragon to know what to do with a directory of dotfiles, it needs to be configured with a file in the directory containing all of the dotfile folders called estragon.yaml. It should be in the same directory as the one specified (either the current one or the one passed with the --dir flag).

For future reference, "dotfile directory" means the same thing as "config directory", that is a folder containing the dotfiles to actually be installed for a particular program. It does not refer to the directory containing the estragon.yaml file, but any directory in that folder is a dotfile directory.

The priority that the common configurations (method, root, and dot-prefix) have, from highest to lowest is the following:

1. Dot level matching environment configuration
2. Dot level configuration
3. Global environment configuration
4. Global configuration

The root level configurations are defined by this table:

Key	Description and possible values
method	"deep", "shallow", "copy", or "none"
root	A full path
check-cmd	An environment-command map
install-cmd	An environment-command map
dot-prefix	true or false
validate	A validation map
environments	Environment specific simple settings
packages	A package specification map
dots	A dot map

method

The method field specifies the default method by which the dotfiles will stay in sync, by either copying every file directly ("copy"), creating a symlink to every file ("deep"), creating symlinks only to specified files and folders in rules ("shallow"), or not doing anything with the dotfiles at all ("none"). All of these will follow the rules of an individual dot. Different methods require different frequencies of syncing if you are constantly modifying your configurations ("copy", "deep", "shallow", and "none" from most to least frequently needing to sync).

If method is set to "shallow" and there are no rules, a single symlink is created from the specified root to the dot root.

Files will never be overwritten with a link or a copied file unless the file is known to be owned by the Estragon directory.

root

The root field specifies the full path to where the dotfiles' directory structures will be placed. Environment variables are processed, as well as ~ being expanded to $HOME. Environment variables should be denoted with the typical dollar sign shell syntax regardless of OS. If an environment variable does not exist, it will be treated as if it is an empty string. If the path contains *, it will replace that * with the name of the dotfile directory, which can be used to specify things like the XDG config directory if the directory name matches the name of its config folder.

Given a dotfile directory in the Estragon root called dots which contains dots/a and dots/dir/b, the below table shows examples of how these dotfiles will be installed on a Unix system.

root	dots/a location	dots/dir/b location
"$HOME/conf"	$HOME/conf/a	$HOME/conf/dir/b
"~/conf"	$HOME/conf/a	$HOME/conf/dir/b
"/conf/*"	/conf/dots/a	/conf/dots/dir/b

check-cmd and install-cmd

The check-cmd represents the command used to verify if a package is already installed to your system. The install-cmd is the command that will actually install the package if check-cmd indicates that it is not already. The actual values of each of these keys are maps from environments to lists of strings, the list representing the actual command to run. If the environment does not match any of the keys, attempting to install packages with Estragon will fail.

The command should expect the name of the package to be the last argument. If running the program with the package name returns a non-zero value, the installation fails.

The commands are not run by any particular shell, so shell expansions will not work.

For example, running Pacman to install a package is typically run as pacman -S [PACKAGE], and checking for a package with Pacman is pacman -T [PACKAGE]. This means that if you use arch in your environment string to indicate any Arch Linux-based distribution (which uses Pacman), you can set these arguments like this:

check-cmd:
  arch: ["pacman", "-T"]
install-cmd:
  arch: ["pacman", "-S"]

Note that these commands don't include things like sudo. If something like sudo is needed to run your package manager, you should run Estragon itself with a user-switching program.

If for some reason your package manager commands cannot accept the package name as the last argument, you can write a shell script that's either in a directory in your PATH or in your Estragon root directory and call it with ./script.sh.

dot-prefix

The dot-prefix field specifies if files with a name that starts with dot- should have that prefix replaced with a lone dot (.). This is to avoid problems that come with hidden files in editors and shells. It is true by default. If it is false, no changes are made to files that start with dot-. If a file is directly referenced by the rules (not by proxy by being in a referenced folder), or the dot is configured to use the shallow method, this setting is ignored and treated as false for that particular file or the entire folder respectively.

validate

The validate field is a map from environments to lists of environments. All keys that match the environment string must also have their values match at least one of the listed environment strings in the values. Environments are validated for every command.

This is useful for ensuring that you don't run Estragon without an important environment component, like a driver name. For example, if you wanted to require a certain set of graphics drivers when you use Debian and there is a mouse, but want a different set of drivers when there is no mouse, you could do something like this:

validate:
  debian:
    - "driver:(abc|def|ghi) mouse"
    - "driver:(rst|uvw|xyz) ! mouse"

Or if you know when you have x and y, you should have z:

validate:
  "x y": ["z"]

Wildcards work here too, so if you require that the name of the Linux distro you are using to be somewhere in the environment string for example, you could do this, which will fail if none of the distros listed are in the environment string:

validate:
  "": ["arch|debian|ubuntu|rhel"]

environments

The environments field configures method, root, and dot-prefix by environment. These configurations are put into their own category instead of being configurable by environment themselves since they vary by environment significantly less than things like packages and where to place dotfiles, meaning they would often just be added noise. These configurations override the defaults if the environment matches.

Example:

environments:
  "windows.*":
    method: copy
    root: xdg
  bsd:
    method: shallow

packages

The packages field allows you to create common names for different groups of packages that exist across environments. The use case for this is when a package has a different name across environments (e.g. python, python3, etc.), or when the bootstrapping requires multiple packages that could be placed under a single name (X11 setup, for example). When a package is referenced and matches any of the package lists specified here, it is expanded to the list resolved to. Otherwise, no expansion is done. The value is a map from environments to lists of packages as strings. See the environment string section for more information on environment string key matching syntax. For example:

packages:
  foo:
    debian: [bar, baz]
    ubuntu:
      - qux
      - quux
  foobar:
    "work|home": ["foobar3"]
    school: ["foobar3.0"]
    "debian-(bookworm|bullseye|jessie)": ["foobar-3"]
  dev-tools:
    "": [git, vim, go]
  driver:
    "driver:(abc|def|ghi)": ["driver-pkg-$1"]
  python:
    work: [python3]
    home: [python] # redundant and unnecessary

dots

The dots field is used to specify how the dotfiles in a dotfile directory should be installed, as well as what packages to install and why. It is a map with keys being dotfile folder names. The values of each is a dot configuration.

Besides packages, the keys that have the same name as a global setting overrides that setting. A dot configuration is defined by this table:

Key	Possible values
method	See method
root	See root
dot-prefix	See dot-prefix
environments	See environments
rules	A rule configuration map
deploy	A custom deploy process
packages	A dot package map

rules

The rules field is a map from environment regular expressions to file maps. A file map is the rules for where to place dotfiles. The key of each mapping is the path to the file (or folder, but from here just refered to as files) relative to the dotfile directory. If a key is empty, it acts as a wildcard for unmatched files. Because only one location can be specified per file, an empty key can have any value and all files that fall back to the wildcard are ignored and therefore not deployed. If a value is the empty string, the associated key will not be deployed. The value supports environment variables and ~ to $HOME expansion. Any files that are specified by the rules will ignore the root and dot-prefix settings. See the environment string section on how to format the environment key. The keys of the map can be templated with the environment string submatches.

For example:

rules:
  "home":
    "gitconfig-home": "$HOME/.gitconfig" # can be shortened to "~/.gitconfig"
    "": ""
  "work":
    "gitconfig-work": "$HOME/.gitconfig"
    "": ""
  "school":
    "gitconfig-school": "$HOME/.gitconfig"
    "": ""

Of course, since keys can be templated with environment string submatches, using the environment string it's possible to shorten this to just:

rules:
  "(home|work|school)":
    "gitconfig-$1": "~/.gitconfig"
    "": ""

The method for resolving where a file will be placed using the deep or copy methods is pretty simple:

1. If the file is any of the keys, the output file will be the value.
2. If the previous case isn't true but the file is within any of the directories specified as keys, the output file will be placed with the key directory replaced with the value directory. The most specific folder will take priority.
3. If the previous case isn't true and there is a wildcard to empty string ("": ""), then the file is ignored and there is no output file.
4. If none of the previous cases are true, the file is placed relative to the specified root.

As an example, say there is a file called dot/dir/ect/f.txt, where dot is a folder that exists in the Estragon root:

1. If there is a key called "dir/ect/f.txt", that key will take precedence and the value will be the one associated with this key.
2. If there is no key like the previous one but there is a "dir/ect" and a "dir" (although this is not recommended), the "dir/ect" will take precedence since it is more specific. If the value to that key is "~/abc", then the output file will be "~/abc/f.txt". If instead that value was associated with the "dir" key, the output file would have been "~/abc/ect/f.txt".
3. If there is no key like any of the previous ones, but there is an empty key, Estragon acts as if f.txt did not exist.
4. If none of the previous conditions are true, then f.txt will be placed relative to the specified root. For example, if it was "home", then the output file would be "$HOME/dir/ect/f.txt".

deploy

There are cases where a specific series commands need to be run in order for a configuration to be installed properly and simply deploying the files isn't enough. For example, it's possible that a command needs to be run to install a crontab file for a specific user.

The deploy field maps environments to a series of commands to be run in order. The commands are arrays of strings in the same way that the check-cmd and install-cmd are. All instances of ~ are replaced with the home directory, all instances of * with the dot name, and all environment variables are replaced with their values. These commands are run when a dot is deployed, not when it's installed.

For example:

deploy:
  arch:
    - ["command", "1"]
    - ["command-two", "~/file"]
    - ["cat", "$MEOW"]

Dot packages

The packages field maps package names to descriptions. The descriptions will be printed while the packages are being installed. The keys are the package name strings that will be expanded by the packages root-level configuration.