augustohp / ore

[Idea] Makes sharing and using multiple dotfiles easy

Ore: Merging dotfiles together

A way to provide (a simple standard) and merge (a program) dotfiles. Multiple repositories might need to affect the same file (e.g ~/.bashrc), Ore allows that.

Ore is two things:

1. A Standard for dotfiles repositories to follow and play nice together
2. A program to merge ore-compatible dotfiles together

The Standard

Every ore repository CAN be a castle, which means:

• They contain a home directory
• home contains files which will be symlinked to the user's home

Ore castles follow just one more rule:

• They don't have files which might be used by other castles

If you have a castle with .bashrc and want to provide it, append _<id> to the file name: .bashrc_phpbrew.

You can search for other Ore compatible repositories on GitHub.

The program

The ore command line is used to merge files from smaller ones:

$ ore ".ssh/config_*" > ~/.ssh/config

The execution above will find all files in your $HOME that start with .ssh/config_ and output its contents to ~/.ssh/config. ore just concatenate files and you are responsible for telling which file they will produce, a couple more examples:

$ ore ".bashrc_*" > ~/.bashrc
$ ore ".bash_environment_*" > ~/.bash_environment
$ ore ".vimrc_*" > ~/.vimrc

The files concatenated by ore are sorted, meaning .vimrc_00-pathogen is output before .vimrc_99-papercolor-colorscheme.

Automating things with hooks

A ore repository can help you by providing three hooks:

• pre-command and post-command are executed before or after ore
• load is used to automatically generate files provided by the repository

Hooks MUST be provided inside a .ore directory. If the repository is a castle, then it will have a home/.ore directory. A hook is a shell file that is executed by ore and follow the convention <when>_<_id>:

• when: Is either pre, post or load
• id is usually the name of your repository

Examples of hook files are: load_ssh_config_work, load_vim-pathogen, load_docker_aliases, pre_docker_aliases and post_docker_aliases.

Automatically merging files with load hook

The load hook is a text file with the file names provided by the repository after they are merged. If a repository provides ~/.vimrc and has a ~/.vimrc_nice-statusbar then the hook file content can be:

# ~/.ore/load_nice-statusbar
# Comments are ignored
ore "$HOME/.vimrc_* >> $HOME/.vimrc

The load hook is only used when you execute ore without any argument (or ore --only-load). All load hooks differ from pre and post hooks as their content is first read, merged together with all other load hook-scripts available so they can be de-duplicated.

Pre and Post hooks

This hooks must be executable, they can be a shell script or program that gets executed by ore if the user accepts the risks involved.

Installation

Ore is a single script program, just put it in your $PATH or:

$ sh <(curl -sSL http://git.io/sinister) -u http://git.io/ore

The above command, after executed, should provide you with a ore command which you will use. To check if installation was successful, you can:

$ ore --version
Ore 1.0.0

If this fails, please let me know.