Dotmanager

This is currently under construction! Dotmanager is considered stable but not production ready at this point! Before I can recommend using this there are a few things I want to have done:

Documentation
Unit and regression tests
Alpha test

Just come back in a few days, I'm constantly developing on this.

What is Dotmanager?

Dotmanager is a tool to manage different versions of your dotfiles on different hosts. Dotmanager is intended to give you maximal flexibility while checking all operations you configured/programmed at the same time to prevent that you accidentally break your systems. To achieve this you can write simple profiles which will define a set of dotfiles that you want to install. Unlike any other dotfile tool which lets you create profiles, those aren't static configuration files but python classes to really give you all flexibility and power you need. If you don't know python don't worry, you won't need to know it to use Dotmanger, but if you do you can really go nuts with this.

Features:

Very flexible generic python profiles
Easy to use but powerful commands + clean syntax
You can use your old repository without any changes. It doesn't matter how you organize your dotfiles.
Alternate versions of dofiles
Advanced error handling (eg integration tests of your written profiles)
Create links anywhere in the filesystem as you like
Create links that point anywhere in the filesystem (not exclusivley to your repository)
Set owner and permission for links
Find and rename dotfiles with regular expressions
Use encrypted dotfiles
Split a dotfile in multiple parts where each one can have alternate versions
Provides an interface for system information (like hostname, distribution, etc)
You can simulate (dry run) everything to see if your self written profile behaves like you expect

More features are comming:

Templates
Hard links (in some edge cases a symbolic link can't be used)
Keep a history of all changes to go back in time
Hooks

Getting Started

Installation

Clone this repository and install python3.7. If you want to use encrypted dotfiles you also need gnupg. Switch into the cloned repository and copy the example config file docs/config-example.ini to data/dotmanger.ini. In this file you need to specify the properties files and profiles in the Settings section where files will be path of the directory of your dotfiles (most likely a subdirectory in your repository) and profiles the directory in which you store all the different profiles that you write (you should store them in a repository as well).

Creating profiles

Create a file in your profiles directory. You can use any name as long as it ends with .py. In this you can create a simple profile for example for your bash configuration:

from dotmanager.profile import Profile
class Bash(Profile):
    def generate(self):
        link(".bashrc")
        link(".inputrc")

If you never used python before this might look confusing. Take a look at this short explanation that tells you everything you need to understand whats going on here. For everyone else its only important to know that a profile is just any python class that inherits of Profile. The name of the subclass will be used as a universal identifier so make sure to name your profiles unique. The only thing you need to do is to implement the generate() function. This function can be thinked of as a shell script that starts in your home-directory. link(".bashrc") will search your files directory for a file called .bashrc and creates a symlink in your home-directory that points to this file. There are just a fistful of other commands like cd(), subprof() or tags() and some options that you can pass to them that will allow you to create very flexible profiles with very easy but expressive syntax.

Installing/Updating/Uninstalling profiles

Installing a profile called Name:

./dotmgr.py -i Name

If the profile is already installed, Dotmanager will search for changes between the already installed links and the profile and will update those that changed. Uninstalling an installed profile called Name:

./dotmgr.py -u Name

You can always use the -d flag to just simulate what will happen. This is especially useful if you changed your profiles, so that you can be sure to don't mess up your system. Take a look at this full documentation of all commandline arguments.

Documentation / Wiki / Examples

For more information about how to use Dotmanager please take a look at the documentation.

FAQ

Please ask me whenever something is not obvious to you. I'm trying to make this as easy as possible.

avalonwilliams / dotmanager