homeshick keeps your dotfiles up to date using only git and bash. It can handle many dotfile repositories at once, so you can beef up your own dotfiles with bigger projects like oh-my-zsh and still keep everything organized.
Symlinking.
On the simplest level, all homeshick really does is look for files and folders
in your cloned repositories and symlink them to your home directory.
The symlinked files must however reside in a folder named home.
This way you can prevent homeshick from cluttering your home folder with
files that are only included from elsewhere.
Each repo is referred to as a castle.
homeshick is installed as a castle, this way it can keep itself updated. In order to create the castle, simply clone it to the appropriate location.
git clone git://github.com/andsens/homeshick.git $HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick
To avoid having to call homeshick with such a long path you can alias it in your .bashrc:
printf '\nalias homeshick="$HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick/home/.homeshick"' >> $HOME/.bashrc
Note: You will have to rerun .bashrc with source $HOME/.bashrc to get the alias working right away.
You can skip the commands part and go to the tutorial if you prefer getting to know homeshick by using it.
homeshick is used via subcommands, so simply typing homeshick will yield a helpful message
that tersely explains all of the things you can do with it.
Most subcommands accept castlenames as arguments. You can also run a subcommand on all castles by not specifying any arguments.
This command symlinks all files that reside in the home folders of your castles into your home folder.
You will be prompted if there are any files or folders that would be overwritten.
If the castle does not contain a home folder it will simply be ignored.
The clone command clones a new git repository to .homesick/repos.
The clone command accepts a github shorthand url, so if you want to clone
oh-my-zsh you can type homeshick clone robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
The pull command runs a git pull on your castle and any of its submodules.
If there are any new dotfiles to be linked, homeshick will prompt you whether you want to link them.
check determines the state of a castle.
- There may be updates on the remote, meaning it is behind.
- Your castle can also contain unpushed commits, meaning it is ahead.
- When everything is in sync,
checkwill report that your castle is up to date.
You can see your installed castles by running the list command.
If you have a new dotfile that you want to put in one of your castles, you can ask
homeshick to do the moving and symlinking for you.
To track your .bashrc and .zshrc in your dotfiles castle
run homeshick track dotfiles .bashrc .zshrc,
the files are automatically added to the git index.
generate creates a new castle.
All you need to do now is call track to fill it with your dotfiles.
Run this command to check if any of your repositories have not been updated the last week. This goes very well with your rc scripts (check out the tutorial for more about this).
In the installation you added an alias to the .bashrc file with
printf '\nalias homeshick="$HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick/home/.homeshick"' >> $HOME/.bashrc
Let's create your first castle to hold this file. You use the generate command to do that:
homeshick generate dotfiles. This creates an empty castle, which you can now populate.
Put the .bashrc file into your dotfiles castle with homeshick track dotfiles .bashrc.
Assuming you have a repository at the other end, let's now enter the castle, commit the changes, add your github remote and push to it.
cd $HOME/.homesick/repos/dotfiles
git commit -m "Initial commit, add .bashrc"
git remote add origin git@github.com/username/dotfiles
git push -u origin master
cd -
Note: The .homesick/ folder is not a typo, it is named as such because of compatibility with
homesick, the ruby tool that inspired homeshick
To get your custom .bashrc file onto other machines you install homeshick and
clone your castle with: $HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick/home/.homeshick clone username/dotfiles
homeshick will ask you immediately whether you want to symlink the newly cloned castle.
If you agree to that and also agree to it overwriting the existing .bashrc you can run
source $HOME/.bashrc to get your homeshick alias running.
You can run check to see whether your castles are up to date or need pushing/pulling.
This is a task that is easy to forget, which is why homeshick has the refresh subcommand.
It examines your castles to see when they were pulled the last time and prompts you to pull
any castles that have not been pulled over the last week.
You can put this into your .bashrc file to run the check everytime you start up the shell:
printf '\nhomeshick --quiet refresh' >> $HOME/.bashrc.
(The --quiet flag makes sure your terminal is not spammed with status info on every startup)
If you prefer to update your dotfiles every other day, simply run homeshick refresh 2 instead.
To make changes to one of your castles you simply use git. For example,
if you want to update your dotfiles castle from a machine which
has it:
cd $HOME/.homesick/repos/dotfiles
git add <newdotfile>
git commit -m "Added <newdotfile>"
git push origin master
homeshick link
After having launched ec2 instances a lot, I got tired of installing zsh, tmux etc. Check out this gist.
In one line you can run a script which installs your favorite shell and multiplexer. It also installs homeshick, which then clones and symlinks your castle(s). To clone via ssh instead of https, you will need a private key.
You may however not trust the current server with agent forwarding, which is why the script contains variables to hold the unencrypted deploy key of your castles (available in the admin section of your repo). They will be added to the ssh-agent in order for git to be able to clone. Enjoy!
The original goal of homeshick was to mimick the functionality of homesick so that it could be a drop-in replacement. Since its inception however homeshick has deviated quite a bit from the ruby-version. All of the original commands are still available, but have been simplified and enhanced with interactive prompts like symlinking new files after a castle has been updated.