DOTDROP

Save your dotfiles once, deploy them everywhere

Dotdrop makes the management of dotfiles between different hosts easy. It allows to store your dotfiles on git and automagically deploy different versions on different setups.

For example you can have a set of dotfiles for your home laptop and a different set for your office desktop. Those sets may overlap and different versions of the same dotfile can be deployed on different predefined profiles. Another use case is when you have a main set of dotfiles for your everyday's host and a sub-set you only need to deploy to temporary hosts (cloud, etc) that may be using a slightly different version of some of the dotfiles.

Features:

• Sync once every dotfile on git for different usages
• Allow dotfiles templating by leveraging jinja2
• Comparison between local and stored dotfiles
• Handling multiple profiles with different sets of dotfiles
• Easy import dotfiles in dotdrop

Check the blog post for more.

Quick start:

mkdir dotfiles && cd dotfiles
git init
git submodule add https://github.com/deadc0de6/dotdrop.git
./dotdrop/bootstrap.sh
./dotdrop.sh --help

---

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
• Template
• Example

Why dotdrop ?

There exist many tools to manage dotfiles however not many allow to deploy different versions of the same dotfile on different hosts. Moreover dotdrop allows to specify the set of dotfiles that need to be deployed on a specific profile.

See the example for a concrete example on why dotdrop rocks.

These are some dotfiles related projects that have inspired me for dotdrop:

• https://github.com/EvanPurkhiser/dots
• https://github.com/jaagr/dots
• https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot
• https://github.com/tomjnixon/Dotfiles

Installation

The following will create a repository for your dotfiles and keep dotdrop as a submodules

mkdir dotfiles; cd dotfiles
git init
git submodule add https://github.com/deadc0de6/dotdrop.git
./dotdrop/bootstrap.sh

Then install the requirements:

sudo pip3 install -r dotdrop/requirements.txt

Finally import your dotfiles as described below.

Usage

If starting fresh, the import function of dotdrop allows to easily and quickly get a running setup.

Install dotdrop on one of your host and then import any dotfiles you want dotdrop to manage (be it a file or a folder)

$ ./dotdrop.sh import ~/.vimrc ~/.xinitrc

Dotdrop does two things:

• Copy the dotfiles in the dotfiles folder
• Create the entries in the config.yaml file

Commit and push your changes.

Then go to another host where your dotfiles need to be managed as well, clone the previously setup git tree and compare local dotfiles with the ones stored by dotdrop

$ ./dotdrop.sh list
$ ./dotdrop.sh compare --profile=<other-host-profile>

Then adapt any dotfile using the template feature and set a new profile for the current host by simply adding lines in the config files, for example:

...
profiles:
  host1:
  - f_vimrc
  - f_xinitrc
  host2:
  - f_vimrc
...

When done, you can install your dotfiles using

$ ./dotdrop.sh install

That's it, a single repository with all your dotfiles for your different hosts.

For additional usage see the help:

$ ./dotdrop.sh --help
     _       _      _
  __| | ___ | |_ __| |_ __ ___  _ __
 / _` |/ _ \| __/ _` | '__/ _ \| '_ |
 \__,_|\___/ \__\__,_|_|  \___/| .__/
                               |_|

Usage:
  dotdrop.py install [--profile=<profile>] [--cfg=<path>]
    [(-f | --force)] [--nodiff] [--dry]
  dotdrop.py compare [--profile=<profile>] [--cfg=<path>]
  dotdrop.py list [--cfg=<path>]
  dotdrop.py import [--cfg=<path>] [--profile=<profile>] [--dry] <paths>...
  dotdrop.py (-h | --help)
  dotdrop.py (-v | --version)

Options:
  --profile=<profiles>    Specify the profile to use [default: hostname].
  --cfg=<path>            Path to the config [default: config.yaml].
  --dry                   Dry run.
  --nodiff                Do not diff when installing [default: False].
  -f --force              Do not warn if exists [default: False].
  -v --version            Show version.
  -h --help               Show this screen.

For easy deployment the default profile used by dotdrop reflects the hostname of the host on which it runs.

Config file details

The config file (defaults to config.yaml) is a yaml file containing the following entries:

• config entry: contains settings for the deployment
  • backup: create a backup of the dotfile in case it differs from the one that will be installed by dotdrop
  • create: create folder hierarchy when installing dotfiles if it doesn't exist
  • dotpath: path to the folder containing the dotfiles to be managed by dotdrop (absolute path or relative to the config file location)
• dotfiles entry: a list of dotfiles in the form

  <dotfile-key-name>:
    dst: <where-this-file-is-deployed>
    src: <filename-within-the-dotpath>

• profiles entry: a list of profiles with a sublist of dotfiles that need to be deployed for this profile

  <some-name-usually-the-hostname>:
    - <some-dotfile-key-name-defined-above>
    - <some-other-dotfile-key-name>
    - ...

Installing dotfiles

Simply run

./dotdrop.sh install

Use the --profile switch to specify a profile if not using the host's hostname.

Diffing your local dotfiles with dotdrop

Compare local dotfiles with dotdrop's defined ones:

./dotdrop.sh compare

Import new dotfiles

Dotdrop allows to import dotfiles directly from the filesystem. It will copy the dotfile and update the config file automatically.

For example to import $HOME/.xinitrc

$ ./dotdrop.sh import $HOME/.xinitrc

List the available profiles

$ ./dotdrop.sh list

Dotdrop allows to choose which profile to use with the --profile switch if you used something else than the default (the hostname).

Update dotbot

If installed through the bootstrap.sh script, dotdrop is installed as a submodule within your git tree. You can thus simply run the following command to update the submodule:

git submodule update --recursive --remote

Template

Dotdrop leverage the power of jinja2 to handle the templating of dotfiles. See jinja2 template doc or the example secion for more information on how to template your dotfiles.

Note that dotdrop uses different delimiters than the jinja2 defaults:

• block start = {%@@
• block end = @@%}
• variable start = {{@@
• variable end = @@}}
• comment start = {#@@
• comment end = @@#}

Example

Let's consider two hosts:

• home: home computer with hostname home
• office: office computer with hostname office

The home computer is running awesomeWM and the office computer bspwm. The .xinitrc file will therefore be different while still sharing some lines. Dotdrop allows to store only one single .xinitrc but to deploy different versions depending on where it is run from.

The following file is the dotfile stored in dotdrop containing jinja2 directives for the deployment based on the profile used.

Dotfile <dotpath>/xinitrc:

#!/bin/bash

# load Xresources
userresources=$HOME/.Xresources
if [ -f "$userresources" ]; then
      xrdb -merge "$userresources" &
fi

# launch the wm
{%@@ if profile == "home" @@%}
exec awesome
{%@@ elif profile == "office" @@%}
exec bspwm
{%@@ endif @@%}

And here's how the config file looks like with this setup. Of course any combination of the dotfiles (different sets) can be done once you have more dotfiles to deploy.

config.yaml file:

config:
  backup: true
  create: true
  dotpath: dotfiles
dotfiles:
  f_xinitrc:
    dst: ~/.xinitrc
    src: xinitrc
profiles:
  home:
  - f_xinitrc
  office:
  - f_xinitrc

Installing the dotfiles (the --profile switch is not needed if the hostname matches the entry in the config file):

# on home computer
./dotdrop.sh install --profile=home
# on office computer
./dotdrop.sh install --profile=office

Comparing the dotfiles:

# on home computer
./dotdrop.sh compare
# on office computer
./dotdrop.sh compare

Contribution

If you are having trouble installing or using dotdrop, open an issue.

If you want to contribute, feel free to do a PR (please follow PEP8).

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the GPLv3 license.