ellipsis

a peace-of-mind dotfile manager

ellipsis is influenced by pass, the standard Unix Password Manager. Like pass, it uses git to export and share personal information across multiple domains. However, uniquely, configuration files can vary across various devices, so there must be a mechanism to broadly share configurations across multiple devices, while still allowing fine customization between each one.

Like many other dotfile managers, ellipsis solves this problem by using symlinks. "Actual" configuration files are stored in the ellipsis home directory, and then linked into the correct locations. Each computer has a different linking scheme, so individual changes can be made by linking slightly different files in each.

The ellipsis home directory

ellipsis chooses its 'home directory', the location in which it stores all persistent state.

The home directory for any invocation of the ellipsis executable is defined to be:

If XDG_DATA_HOME is defined, $XDG_DATA_HOME/ellipsis.
$HOME/.ellipsis otherwise.

Configuration and Linking

Each computer self-identifies with a different hostname. During linking, ellipsis identifies a file called [hostname].dot.json in the ellipsis home directory. This file contains a specification of what links to use:

{
  "links" : {
    ".bashrc"   : "~/.bashrc",
    "xmonad.hs" : "~/xmonad/xmonad.hs",
    "init.vim"    : "~/.config/nvim/init.vim"
  }
}

Running ellipsis link creates a symlink from each of the left hand files (resolved relative to the home directory) to each of the destination files (specified as absolute paths.) Running ellipsis unlink deletes the links.

Example workflow

Testing

Because the operations carried out by ellipsis modify both the filesystem and various environment variables, there is a danger that various tests will exhibit race conditions on environment variables if run concurrently.

Thus, these processes ust be run one after another. To test, run:

cargo test --verbose -- --test-threads 1

Or, simply

./test.sh

Dependencies

Requires cmake (for building libssh2-sys)

Caveats

In order to choose which configurations are relevant for each given device, ellipsis relies on self-identified hostnames for each. If you have a public-facing git repository to store your dotfiles, a .dot.json file containing your hostname may be visible to the public.

At the moment, there is not an alternative scheme to differentiate between computers. If you have another proposal for this, please submit an issue!

If you are concerned, you can keep your *.dot.json files ignored by git, which prevents any sharing whatsoever. Each computer really only needs its own configuration, so there is no need to share these files across the internet anyway. This is currently the workflow preferred by the author.

ndrewtl / ellipsis