dotsync

Sync your dotfiles (or other utilities) using only:

• ~100 sloc of POSIX sh as a framework
• a folder for each set of dotfiles
• a configuration file for each box you manage that has one folder name per line

Seriously, it doesn't take much to do this stuff.

Usage

Use bin/dotsync [BASE DIR], or make sure bin/ is on your PATH and call simpy as dotsync. The base dir should contain boxen/ and dotfiles/ (e.g. it could just point to this repository). If it is omitted, then it defaults to ~/dotsync.

You can also source bin/dotfuncs, and then call the functions dotup, dotdown, and dotsync manually (but why?). Thankfully, there's only ~50 sloc in there, so go read the implementation as "documentation".

Configuration

You may place a number of text files under boxen/. The framework finds boxen/$(hostname), so the file used for your machine is the one with the same name as the host. You can also override a host config for a particular user with a file at boxen/${USER}@$(hostname). These are configs, and come in two flavors---host configs and base configs---which are distinguished by how dotsync finds them, but are otherwise identical. By convention, included configs should be named in all-caps.

Each line of a host/base config is a command indicating one or more modules to be installed/uninstalled. See "Writing Dotfiles" coming up next for what a "module" is. Blank lines, and those starting with # are ignored. Normally, a line names a module to be installed. If, however, the line starts with !, that module is uninstalled. Lines beginning with + include all the directives from the named base config. If a module/base config doesn't exist, then a warning is emitted, but otherwise the framework carries on installing all the modules it can find. Thanks to my not being able to get IFS to work as expected, and read being silly as usual, apparently we can't have nice things, like any whitespace on the lines.

Writing Dotfiles

The dotfiles/ folder should only contain directories. These are what I'm calling "modules". Each module name here is what is referenced by the boxen/* configuration files.

Each module should have a file install.sh. This file should define four functions:

• dotsync_depsgood --- check that the dotfiles make sense on the system (i.e. don't install X11-related dotfiles if there isn't an X11 install on the system)
• dotsync_newest --- check if the current install is up-to-date with what the module expects
• dotsync_setup --- install from a fresh state
• dotsync_teardown --- uninstall without fail, even if the module isn't currently installed

There's a script lint.sh that checks that the scripts in dotfiles/ are written in particularly safe ways. (Atm, this just means parameters substitution is always in brackets, and echos are always to stderr.)

You can use $dotdir to obtain an absolute path to the directory of the module.