dotfiles-sync 0.0.3

Manages dotfile configuration files across operating systems

dotfiles-sync

dotfiles-sync is a command line application which helps manage configuration files (typically dotfiles) across different machines and operating systems.

• dotfiles-sync
  • Motivation
  • Getting Started
    • list
    • sync
    • update

Motivation

I needed a solution which would allowed me to easily automate synchronising my configuration files as I jump between different machines which could be either Windows or Linux.

Getting Started

The --help will always show the most up to date options:

❯ dotfiles --help
usage: dotfiles [-h] [-c CONFIG] [-w CONFIG_DIR] [-d] [-i] {list,sync,update} ...

positional arguments:
  {list,sync,update}

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -c CONFIG, --config CONFIG
                        dotfiles configuration. Points to target locations.
  -w CONFIG_DIR, --config_dir CONFIG_DIR
                        Location of the configuration files to sync
  -d, --dry             Never actually write any files, only read and show me what you would have done
  -i, --interactive     Before doing a write, ask for confirmation

This application relies on the fact that you store your configuration in source control and that you define a configuration file which declares your configurations you want to track along with paths per operating system.

An example of a configuration file is:

{
    "config": 
    {
        ".bashrc": 
        {
            "Linux": "~/.bashrc",
            "Windows": "~/.bashrc"
        }
    }
}

Where .bashrc is the file in the configuration directory we are interested in tracking. The configuration directory is the directory where the central authrority of that file lives (typically a git repository which contains all your configuration files). This key could also be directory e.g bash/.bashrc if you wanted to keep all your bash related configuration files in organised into a bash folder.

Each key contains paths to operating system specific path the file should be syncronised into. The operating systems supported here are the same as the ones that come in platform.system. Paths are also expanded using os.path.expanduser which means special symbols like ~ will be expanded in both Window and Linux.

list

Once you have a dotfiles configuration and configuration directory you can run list:

❯ dotfiles --config examples/config.json --config_dir examples/configs list
[18:58:55] INFO     Listing Configurations
           INFO     .bashrc: examples/configs/.bashrc => /home/kiran/.bashrc (ConfigurationMatchStatus.SYNCHRONIZABLE | ConfigurationFileType.FILE)
           INFO     .vimrc: examples/configs/.vimrc => /home/kiran/.vimrc (ConfigurationMatchStatus.SYNCHRONIZABLE | ConfigurationFileType.FILE)
           INFO     pgcli: examples/configs/pgcli => /home/kiran/.config/pgcli (ConfigurationMatchStatus.SYNCHRONIZABLE | ConfigurationFileType.DIRECTORY)

SYNCHRONIZABLE means it looks like it is possible to synchronise this file and FILE tells us the type of synchronize it's going to do (as oppsosed to DIRECTORY which will do a recursive copy).

sync

If we are happy, then we can do a sync. This will take the files in your configuration directory and allow them to the machine.

❯ dotfiles --config examples/config.json --config_dir examples/configs sync

[18:59:41] INFO     Copying File examples/configs/.bashrc => /home/kiran/.bashrc
           INFO     Copying File examples/configs/.vimrc => /home/kiran/.vimrc
           INFO     Copying Directory examples/configs/pgcli => /home/kiran/.config/pgcli
Syncing Configuration... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% 0:00:00

update

You may want to also do the reverse and update your configuration directory with the files on your current machine. This can be done using update:

❯ dotfiles --config examples/config.json --config_dir examples/configs update

[19:01:47] INFO     Copying File /home/kiran/.bashrc => examples/configs/.bashrc
           INFO     Copying File /home/kiran/.vimrc => examples/configs/.vimrc
           INFO     Copying Directory /home/kiran/.config/pgcli => examples/configs/pgcli
Updating Configuration Directory: examples/configs ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% 0:00:00