dotfiles

dotfiles.sh is a small Bash 4 script that will selectively symlink configuration files into to your home directory, depending on your operating system, architecture, hostname or domain name. The functional objective of which is to allow storage of all configuration files, regardless of operating system or host, in a single source VCS repository such as GitHub or BitBucket.

See https://github.com/neechbear/dotfiles-example for a real-world example of how this can be used.

Installation

Installation is as simple as:

git clone https://github.com/neechbear/dotfiles.git
dotfiles/bin/dotfiles.sh install
dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-symlink-files dotfiles/ ~

It may look something like this:

nicolaw@laptop:~$ git clone https://github.com/neechbear/dotfiles.git
Cloning into 'dotfiles'...
remote: Counting objects: 3, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
nicolaw@laptop:~$ cd dotfiles/
nicolaw@laptop:~/dotfiles$ bin/dotfiles.sh install
‘bin/dotfiles-available-identities’ -> ‘dotfiles.sh’
‘bin/dotfiles-file-weights’ -> ‘dotfiles.sh’
‘bin/dotfiles-symlink-files’ -> ‘dotfiles.sh’
‘bin/dotfiles-normalised-files’ -> ‘dotfiles.sh’
‘bin/dotfiles-best-file’ -> ‘dotfiles.sh’
nicolaw@laptop:~/dotfiles$ bin/dotfiles-symlink-files ~/dotfiles/ ~
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-symlink-files’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-symlink-files’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-available-identities’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-available-identities’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-normalised-files’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-normalised-files’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-file-weights’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-file-weights’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-best-file’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-best-file’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles.sh’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles.sh’
nicolaw@laptop:~/dotfiles$

You can then put files inside your dotfiles directory that will either get symlinked in to place on all your machines, or name them with a special ~IDENTITY suffix, this limiting which machines that particular file will be symlinked on.

Available identiies can be found with the dotfiles-available-identities command.

nicolaw@laptop:~/dotfiles$ bin/dotfiles-available-identities
@laptop
@laptop.home.nicolaw.co.uk
%debian
%linux
%linux-4.4.0-45-generic
%linux-4.9.0-3-amd64
@home.nicolaw.co.uk
%xenial
%ubuntu
%ubuntu-16.04
%ubuntu-xenial

Multiple identities can be applied to a file by delimiting them with comma , characters.

Composite identities requiring more than one identity to be matched can be applied by concatinating them with the plus + character.

Examples

• dotfiles/.bashrc~%linux
• dotfiles/.bachrc~%darwin,%freebsd
• dotfiles/.bash_logout~@myhostname.domain.com+%ubuntu-trusty

Where more than one file matches a host, a weighting order is applied to the file identities, and the highest weighted file is used. See dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-file-weights for an example.

Here we create a couple of different .examplerc files. The first is intended to be used on Ubuntu and Debian based hosts; the second on RedHat and Fedora.

nicolaw@laptop:~$ echo "# Debian family example config file" > 'dotfiles/.examplerc~%ubuntu,%debian'
nicolaw@laptop:~$ echo "# RedHat family example config file" > 'dotfiles/.examplerc~%redhat,%fedora'

Next we re-run the dotfiles-symlink-files command, giving ~/dotfiles/ as the source directory containing your configuration files that you want to be symlinked to, and the second argument ~ indicating the files should be linked in to your home directory.

nicolaw@laptop:~$ dotfiles-symlink-files ~/dotfiles/ ~
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-normalised-files’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-normalised-files’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-available-identities’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-available-identities’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-best-file’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-best-file’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-file-weights’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-file-weights’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles.sh’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles.sh’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-symlink-files’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-symlink-files’
‘/home/nicolaw/.examplerc’ -> ‘dotfiles/.examplerc~%ubuntu,%debian’
nicolaw@laptop:~$ ll .examplerc
lrwxrwxrwx 1 nicolaw nicolaw 35 Nov  1 23:09 .examplerc -> dotfiles/.examplerc~%ubuntu,%debian
nicolaw@laptop:~$ cat .examplerc
# Debian family example config file
nicolaw@laptop:~$

Cleaning Up

If you have renamed or deleted a number of files inside your dotfiles directory, then you may be left with a number of old broken dangling symlinks.

You can use the find command to locate such broken symlinks, and then delete them.

First find the broken symlinks and check that you're happy to delete them (that your find command didn't find any false positives):

find ~ -lname '*/dotfiles/*' ! -execdir test -e '{}' \; -print

If you're happy with the results, simply add the -delete argument on the end of the find command:

find ~ -lname '*/rcfiles/*' ! -execdir test -e '{}' \; -print -delete

Example Usage

See the https://github.com/neechbear/dotfiles-example GitHub project for a real-world example of how to use this software.

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2016 Nicola Worthington nicolaw@tfb.net

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.