4.4 KiB
dotfilemanager.py
A dotfiles manager script.
This is similar to Steve Kemp's dotfile manager but I rewrote it in Python and tweaked the behaviour a bit.
Requirements
Python 2.7. It might work (or could easily be made to work) with 2.6 and 3.x as well but I haven't tried.
Installation
pip install dotfilemanager
Usage
dotfilemanager link Make a symlink in your homedir to each top-level
file and directory in ~/.dotfiles.
dotfilemanager tidy Delete any broken symlinks in your homedir.
dotfilemanager report Report on what link or tidy would do, but don't
actually create or delete any symlinks.
Optionally you can specify the directories to link from and to as arguments, usage:
dotfilemanager link|tidy|report [FROM_DIR [TO_DIR]]
The idea is that you have some folder called the TO_DIR (defaults to
~/.dotfiles), where you move all the dotfiles that you want to manage,
e.g.
~/.dotfiles/
~/.dotfiles/_muttrc
~/.dotfiles/_nanorc
...
You can backup and synchronise this directory between multiple hosts
using rsync, unison, a version-control system, Dropbox, or whatever you
want. When you run dotfilemanager link it will create symlinks in a
folder called the FROM_DIR (defaults to ~), e.g.
~/.muttrc -> ~/.dotfiles/_muttrc
~/.nanorc -> ~/.dotfiles/_nanorc
...
Leading underscores in the filenames in TO_DIR will be converted to
leading dots for the symlinks. You can also link files without leading
underscores, and you can link directories too, just place them in
TO_DIR and run dotfilemanager link.
Per-host configuration is supported by putting __hostname at the end
of file and directory names in TO_DIR. For example if TO_DIR
contains files named:
_muttrc
_muttrc__kisimul
_muttrc__dulip
Then on the host dulip a symlink FROM_DIR/.muttrc will be created to
TO_DIR/_muttrc__dulip. On a host named kisimul _muttrc__kisimul will be
linked to. On other hosts _muttrc will be linked to.
(To discover the hostname of your machine run uname -n.)
Tip: handle directories like ~/.config separately
On my system a lot of config files are stored in ~/.config. I want to
manage some of the files in ~/.config but not all of them. I have
host-specific versions of some files in ~/.config but not others. I
wouldn't want to move ~/.config to ~/.dotfiles/_config and have
dotfilemanager make a symlink ~/.config -> ~/.dotfiles/_config because
that would be putting all the files in ~/.config into ~/.dotfiles,
and dotfilemanager would make the same symlink for every host, if I
wanted a host-specific version of a file in ~/.config I'd have to put
another complete copy of the directory into ~/.dotfiles with a
__hostname at the end.
What you can do instead is have a ~/config directory separate from
~/.dotfiles, move the files from ~/.config that you want to manage
into ~/config, make host-specific versions if you want, then run both
commands:
dotfilemanager.py link ~ ~/.dotfiles
dotfilemanager.py link ~/.config ~/config
Tip: override hostname with DOTFILEMANAGER_HOSTNAME environment variable
If the DOTFILEMANAGER_HOSTNAME environment variable is set then it is
used instead of your real hostname to resolve hostname-specific files in
TO_DIR. This is useful for accounts on networked systems where you
login to the same user account from different computers, the system
hostname will be different each time you switch computers but you want
to use the same config files whenever you login to this account. So just
make up a name for the account and set it as the value of
DOTFILEMANAGER_HOSTNAME.