Stow-like recursive symlinking

[eddiezane]

Given this directory, with stow I can run stow nvim from the root of my dot files repo to recursively symlink all the files resulting in ~/.config/nvim/{coc-config.vim,coc-settings.json,init.vim} existing.

I see that file.symlink was implemented (side note: looks like it didn't make the readme yet. I can PR that.). Would this behavior be more aligned to a directory.link? Or maybe an option on the directory.copy action?

[rawkode]

This is a great question. The reason it didn't make directory.copy is because I wasn't sure if that action would handle any templating or not and symlinks can't be templated / rendered.

A directory.link would be a welcomed changed.

Side note: yeah, docs are missing a few things. We're currently working on migrating them from mdBook to GitBook. Won't be long 😃

[eddiezane]

I'll try and whip something up this weekend! Rust has been near the top of my list to learn for a bit now.

[rawkode]

@eddiezane file.link will work for this use case now. It doesn’t matter if the to param is a file or directory, it creates the link either way.

Docs still need updated since the big atom refactor, but adding your own actions is a lot simpler now.

[eddiezane]

Stellar! I've slowly been making my way through the Rust book. Haven't been scared away yet 😅.

[rawkode]

Closing this just now, as I beleive file.link handles this. Please feel free to open this again if I am wrong and I'll get it sorted

[eddiezane]

Ah sorry I misunderstood your previous comment.

Thank you!

[eddiezane]

Had a chance to test this.

file.link does work for linking an entire directory but isn't quite what I was looking for.

Stow will recursively walk a directory and link files individually.

Take my neovim config for example:

 ~/.dotfiles[main ☂ ] tree -a nvim
nvim
└── .config
    └── nvim
        ├── coc-config.vim
        ├── coc-settings.json
        └── init.vim

Running stow nvim will keep the directory structure and individually link the files using $HOME as the root by default.

 ~/.dotfiles[main ☂ ] ls -la ~/.config/nvim
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   7 ezaneski  staff  224 Feb  8 16:36 .
drwxr-xr-x  16 ezaneski  staff  512 Feb 23 18:45 ..
drwxr-xr-x   4 ezaneski  staff  128 Apr 30 09:56 autoload
lrwxr-xr-x   1 ezaneski  staff   48 Oct 19  2020 coc-config.vim -> ../../.dotfiles/nvim/.config/nvim/coc-config.vim
lrwxr-xr-x   1 ezaneski  staff   51 Oct 19  2020 coc-settings.json -> ../../.dotfiles/nvim/.config/nvim/coc-settings.json
lrwxr-xr-x   1 ezaneski  staff   42 May 14  2020 init.vim -> ../../.dotfiles/nvim/.config/nvim/init.vim
drwxr-xr-x  23 ezaneski  staff  736 May  5 12:05 plugged

This allows for encapsulating different programs into folders - sort of like a deb package would do. Based on the path in the folder I can see that .dotfiles/nvim/.config/nvim/init.vim should live under $HOME/.config/nvim.

I'd like to replicate the same behavior (doesn't have to be directory.link):

actions:
- action: directory.link
  from: $HOME/.dotfiles/nvim
  to: $HOME

This could be manually accomplished with individual file links but an action would simplify it. The answer could also be this is an anti-pattern for comtrya and to keep using stow 😅. I'm realizing that this setup offloads the configuration to the directory structure.

[rawkode]

@eddiezane I've "maybe" implemented this in #139

Can you maybe test it and see if the behaviour matches up with what you expected?

It doesn't do recursive, as I wasn't sure creating the directories to then symlink inside made any sense beyond just symlinking the directories too.

Lemme know 😄