Deprecated

Dotman has been deprecated. Instead of using it to manage system adminstration, I do things manually and keep a separate log for each machine, which records all system administration operations done outside of ~/files, inside which live my dotfiles and personal documents.

The remainder of this README is included for historical value only.

Idea

When setting up a new machine, there is a lot to do. You need to install all your packages, symlink your dotfiles, set up your application preferences, perform system administration tasks, and install all those little hacks that you did once upon a time to fix things but no longer remember.

Wouldn't it be great if you had some software that could do that all for you? Enter Dotman. With Dotman, you encode your system administration tasks into a set of virtual "packages", each defined as a simple Python script with some metadata. A package can represent software that should be installed, configuration files that should be symlinked, some one-off script that should be installed, or anything else that you can program in Python.

What does Dotman get you over a simple collection of scripts? Firstly, Dotman provides a library of useful utility functions like "make sure version X of Homebrew package Y is installed with option Z enabled", so that writing your own packages is as quick and easy as possible (if it's not easy, who ever bothers to do it?). Secondly, Dotman allows you to define named "groups" of packages, and it keeps track of which packages are already "installed". That way, you can simply ask it to get your machine ready for some Ruby development in Emacs, and if you've already had it installed Ruby then it won't do that again (unless you ask it to double-check the dependencies).

Setup

On a new machine, you'll have a couple of steps to get everything running from scratch:

• Install the operating system and get connected to the Internet.
• Install Git and clone your Dotman configuration.
• Install Python and then install Dotman using Git+Pip.
• Ask Dotman to use your configuration to set up the rest of the system as desired.

Configuration format

A Dotman configuration is a directory, probably a Git repository, with a subdirectory called packages. The packages subdirectory has a number of Python scripts, with script configure_emacs.py corresponding to a package called configure-emacs for example.

Package metadata is defined by setting global variables in the script, for example:

DESCRIPTION = "Symlink Emacs dotfiles."
DEPENDENCIES = ["emacs", "dotfiles"]

Then to describe what should happen when the package is installed, you define a global install() function. It's that simple!

Helpful functions like install_homebrew_package can be obtained by importing the dotman module.

Usage

The main command is dotman install, which takes a list of packages whose scripts should be run. The -u or --upgrade flag causes the scripts to be run in "upgrade mode"; dotman upgrade is an alias for dotman install -u.

Packages are skipped if they were installed already by Dotman (or, for -u, if they were upgraded in the last 24 hours). This can be overridden by the -f or --force flag. The same can be achieved for dependencies of the named packages with the -F or --force-all flag.