egor-tensin / config-links

Configuration file sharing

Config file sharing

• Store your files in a repository.
• Checkout it on any machine.
• Create and maintain symlinks to these files easily.

How it works

Actual files are stored in directories with names matching the %VAR_NAME% pattern. The part between the percent signs is the name of an environment variable. Every file in such directory gets a symlink in the directory pointed to by the environment variable. Directory hierarchies are preserved.

A database of symlinks is maintained in case a shared file is deleted (the corresponding symlink is then deleted too). The default database file name is "links.bin", maintained in the top-level directory with shared files.

For a complete usage example, see below.

Installation

• For Arch Linux, use the AUR package.
• For Ubuntu, use the PPA.
• Alternatively, just checkout this repository.
• For macOS, see this section.

Usage

Symlinks are created & maintained by links-update.

usage: links-update [-h|--help] [-d|--database PATH] [-s|--shared-dir DIR] [-m|--mode MODE] [-n|--dry-run]

To remove all symlinks, use links-remove.

usage: links-remove [-h|--help] [-d|--database PATH] [-s|--shared-dir DIR] [-n|--dry-run]

In this example, symlinks to files in "/test/src" must appear in "/test/dest".

$ tree /test/dest/
/test/dest/

0 directories, 0 files

$ tree /test/src/
/test/src/
└── %DEST%
    ├── a
    │   └── b
    │       └── c
    │           └── test.txt
    └── foo
        └── bar
            └── baz

6 directories, 2 files

$ echo "$DEST"
/test/dest

$ ./links-update --shared-dir /test/src/
...

$ tree /test/dest/
/test/dest/
├── a
│   └── b
│       └── c
│           └── test.txt -> /test/src/%DEST%/a/b/c/test.txt
└── foo
    └── bar
        └── baz -> /test/src/%DEST%/foo/bar/baz

5 directories, 2 files

For my personal real-life usage examples, see

• my dotfiles,
• configuration files for various Windows apps.

Development

Run local tests using

make test

Run Docker tests using

make test/docker

Run all tests using

make test/all

Limitations

Variable names must be alphanumeric. More precisely, the corresponding directory names must match the ^%[_[:alpha:]][_[:alnum:]]*%$ regular expression. Consequently, ProgramFiles(x86) (and other weird variable names Windows allows) are not supported.

A special variable name CONFIG_LINKS_ROOT is resolved to the root path, "/".

macOS

macOS is supported on a basic level. GNU coreutils and findutils are required, which you can install using Homebrew. Don't forget to add them to PATH!

Cygwin

These scripts rely on the availability of native symlinks. On Windows/NTFS, they require Administrator privileges.

Remember that in order to force ln to use native NTFS symlinks, your CYGWIN environment variable must include either winsymlinks:native or winsymlinks:nativestrict.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt for details.