Modular dotfiles manager

We all love dotfiles, don't we? There are excellent collections of dotfiles from people who are courageously publishing those online. That's awesome! Despite all the awesomeness, there is one thing that bothers me: the monolithic nature of a repository that contains all the dotfiles at once. Personally, I'm facing the situation quite often where I want to grab one configuration but not everything. There are also situations where I have dotfiles which should not be publicly available, like my ssh config which I use at work. Is there any solution for this? Sure, you could maintain multiple dotfiles repos (personal, work, server, etc.). But let's face it. This would result in a lot of duplicate configuration files. Meh.

Wouldn't it be cool to pick only the dotfiles I really want? That is where dots comes to play. It encourages you to separate your dotfiles into small, encapsulated repositories. dots provides a management CLI with which you can install, update and uninstall your personal dotfile collection. With other words: dots is a dotfiles structure philosophy and a tool at once.

Important: Please note that dots is currently in beta.

Convinced to give dots a try? The installation is as easy as managing your personal dotfile collection. There are two ways of installing dots:

To install or update dots, you can use the install script using cURL:

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/akoenig/dots/master/install.sh | bash

This script will install dots in $HOME/.dots and adds the source line to your profile. Restart your shell session in order to finalize the installation.

There is also a manual way of installing dots. Create a directory somewhere in your filesystem and cd into it. Then clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/akoenig/dots .

Now add the following line to your profile (e.g. .zshrc, .bashrc, etc.):

source <the-path-to-your-installation>/dots

Restart your shell session in order to finalize the installation.

dots help

  dots - Your dotfiles manager

  Usage: dots [COMMAND] [OPTION]

  Available commands:

  install <repository>  Installs the given dots
  update <dots>         Updates the given dots repository
  uninstall <dots>      Uninstalls the given dots repository
  ls					Lists all installed dots repositories
  help                  Prints this help

Install the given dots repository to your personal dotfile collection. An example:

dots install git@github.com:akoenig/aliases.dots

This will install my personal aliases.

Sync a respective local dots repository with the remote one.

dots update aliases

This would update the aliases shown in the example before.

Uninstalls a local dots repository.

dots uninstall aliases

This would uninstall the dots repository with the name aliases.

Lists all currently installed dots repositories.

This is a list of dots repositories that have been spotted in the wild. Let me know, if you've seen one as well. I will add it here.

• akoenig/aliases.dots
• akoenig/node.dots

Having a dotfiles manager is a nice thing, but how to write own dots repositories this manager can consume? It's easy. Follow along.

First of all you have to setup a new git repository and create a file, called dots.manifest, in it. I know what you might think: "Wohaa! Yet another manifest definition!1one". No worries, this one is just a two-liner. An example:

name='the-name-of-your-dots-repo',
author='First name Last name <email-address>'

That's all, I promise.

The next step is to create an install script, called install.sh, and an uninstall script, the uninstall.sh. Those scripts will be executed by dots when installing/uninstalling your dots repository. They should contain the logic that is necessary to install or uninstall this particular dots repository.

dots exposes an API which is available within your install.sh and uninstall.sh.

An environment variable which contains the path to your dots repository. If you want to access files within your repository you would use this variable in the install.sh / uninstall.sh (e.g. $SELF/a-file).

Provides an interface for inserting instructions to your profile (e.g. .zshrc, .bashrc, etc.).

dots_profile_add "source $HOME/aliases"

Please note that there is no "remove" equivalent. You don't have to worry about removing the written statements. dots will do this for you automatically in the uninstall step.

Important note: Please make sure that you batch all your statements you want to write to the profile and call this function only once within your install.sh.

Helper function for printing a success message to stdout.

Helper function for printing a finished message to stdout.

Helper function for printing a info message to stdout.

Helper function for printing a warn message to stdout.

Helper function for printing a fail message to stdout.

No. You can still create a repository, called dotfiles. The main differences would be that you don't put your actual dotfiles in there but only a file containing all the dots repositories you want to use, like

git@github.com:akoenig/aliases.dots
git@github.com:<another-user0>/<another-dots-repo0>
git@github.com:<another-user1>/<another-dots-repo1>
git@github.com:<another-user2>/<another-dots-repo2>

You can grab this file (via GitHub raw content) and pipe it to the dots CLI:

curl <url-to-the-file> | while read -r repo; do dots install "$repo"; done

You don't even need a full-fledged GitHub repository for that, GitHub Gist got you covered as well.

MIT © André König