dot

About

dot is a bash script for synchronising personal configuration files (often colloquially called "dotfiles") using Git repositories. See dotfiles for an example repository using this approach.

Usage

Summary

dot repo-address /home/user1 .your .dot .files

Stores the .your, .dot, and .files files in the repository you specify (local or remote) and removes their /home/user1 prefix.

dot repo-address /home/user2

Retrieves the files you stored in the repository and saves them locally, relative to /home/user2

WARNING dot will overwrite any existing files at file paths contained in the repository.

Details

The arguments to dot are as follows:

dot <repo> <base> [paths*]

dot has two modes of operation, based on whether the optional path arguments are supplied.

dot http://user@domain.com/user/repo /path/to /path/to/a/dot/file other/file

Assuming we are in /path/to/the, the above will store /path/to/a/dot/file as >a>dot>file and other/file as >the>other>file in the specified repository. Note that file paths cannot contain > characters because these are reserved path characters in the context of dot. Also note that the file paths may be relative to the current directory but the base path (/path/to in this example) must be absolute.

dot http://user@github.com/user/repo /path/for

This command is the same as in the first example, but with the optional paths omitted. This mode pulls all files stored in the repository to the locations they were pushed from, relative to the base path. Continuing on from the first example, this command would store >a>dot>file at /path/for/a/dot/file and would store >the>other>file at /path/for/the/other/file, replacing any files that were at those locations.

Notes

• dot does not support removing files from the repository so this must be done manually if required.
• dot.bats contains unit tests for dot and can be used to find out expected behaviour.

Installing

dot is a single bash script. It can be run from where it was downloaded, using bash, or can be made executable using chmod and put in a directory in your PATH for convenience.

A useful shortcut is to add an alias for dot to your shell initialisation script that contains the repository address and your base directory:

alias dot='bash /path/to/dot http://user@github.com/user/repo $HOME'

This simplifies the commands to just be dot and dot files. We can also sync our shell initialisation script using dot which means that we only need to create our alias once.

Another trick is to use curl/wget to run the most up-to-date version of dot, which can also be used with the alias:

alias dot='curl --silent https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ezanmoto/dot/master/dot | bash -s - http://user@github.com/user/repo'

Note that you can specify a specific revision of the script to mitigate the security concerns of always running the newest version. Finally note that if you have this alias in a shell initialisation script that has been committed to the repository in the alias then you can simply run the command directly on a new computer to "install" dot on it and pull all your configurations down in one go.

Tests

Unit tests for dot are contained in dot.bats and are run using bats:

bats dot.bats

Alternatively, the tests can be run in the canonical environment for this project defined in Dockerfile. The following creates the environment and runs all tests in it:

bash docker_test.sh

docker_test.sh suppresses the output from building and running Docker containers until something goes wrong. Passing the -v flag causes docker_test.sh to output build progress information as it is generated.