Dott -- simple dotfiles management

Dott is a simple shell script I wrote to manage my dotfiles. It handles the updating and symlinking into $HOME of all my dotfiles, kept in a Git repository.

Installation

To install dott, simply put the dott file somewhere in your $PATH and make it executable. One way to do so would be:

% curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/avdgaag/dott/master/dott > /usr/local/bin/dott
% chmod +x /usr/local/bin/dott

You can test if everything works alright by running dott --version. You should see something along these lines:

% dott --version
0.1.0

Usage

Here is the help contents displayed when you run dott --help:

Usage: dott [subcommand] [options]

Available subcommands:

  clone          Install dotfiles from a Git repository into ~/.dotfiles
  update         Fetch new commits from the remote repository and optionally
                 update subtree-merged remote repositories.
  link           Symlink all the files in the dotfiles directory into the
                 home directory.
  unlink         Remove symlinks to files in the dotfiles directory from
                 the home directory.

Options for update:

  -s, --subtrees Also fetch new commits for merged subtrees and squash them
                 into the local repository. This reads subtree directories
                 and repositories from ~/.dotfiles/.gitsubtrees.

Options for link:

  -f, --force    Overwrite files even if they already exist.
  -p, --pretend  Display results but don't actually change anything

Options for unlink:

  -p, --pretend  Display results but don't actually change anything

Generic options:

  -v, --version  Show version information
  -h, --help     Show this message

A normal workflow would be to first install your personal dotfiles from a Git repository in your local home directory:

% dott clone git@github.com:avdgaag/dotfiles.git

This will clone the repository into ~/.dotfiles.

Then, symlink all the files from ~/.dotfiles/home into $HOME:

% dott link

To overwrite any existing files, use the --force flag:

% dott link --force

To clean up again, remove all your symlinks using unlink:

% dott unlink

To update your ~/.dotfiles directory from its remote repository, use dott update:

% dott update

My personal dotfiles repo has a list of other repositories merged into it using a Git subtree merge. Dott can update these repositories automatically by adding the --subtrees flag to dott update:

% dott update --subtrees

Credits and links

Author: Arjan van der Gaag arjan@arjanvandergaag.nl Date: August 2014 Website: http://avdgaag.github.io/dott Issues https://github.com/avdgaag/dott/issues Source https://github.com/avdgaag/dott Changelog See CHANGELOG.md

License

Dott is released under the MIT license (see LICENSE).