If you are like me, you probably store your dotfiles in a git repo and symlink them into the right places. However, this always takes a considerable amount of time to do on a new system. In the past, I resorted to shell scripts to do my bidding, but that was often machine-specific, wouldn't allow me to configure multiple machines without significant hassle, and was generally a bit clunky.

The solution: dots

dots is a machine-agnostic, fs-agnostic and structure-agnostic deployer for dotfiles stored in an arbitrary directory. Written in rust, it's :sparkles: blazingly fast :sparkles: and easy to use.

Installation

To install dots, head over to the releases page and choose the appropriate option for your system. dots currently only supports linux, but in glibc and MUSL variants.

To build from source, simply clone and run cargo build --release.

Usage

At the core, dots just symlinks arbitrary files and directories as specified by a configuration file. Refer to the dots.toml section for an example.

To deploy a set of files, use dots deploy.

If you want to un-deploy a set of dots (removing the links created), you can use dots unlink

dots.toml

By default, dots will look for a dots.toml file in the current directory.

Example dots.toml:

dots_dir = "/home/anon/dots" # If omitted, defaults to working directory

[[dot]]
src = "nvim" # Resolved against dots_dir
dest = ".config/nvim" # Relative paths are resolved against $HOME

[[dot]]
host = "hermes" # You can specify on which hosts this dot should be deployed
src = "Xmodmap"
dest = "/etc/X11" # Absolute paths are respected

[[dot]]
src = "tmux.conf"
dest = ".tmux.conf"

[[...]]

If you want to use a different file (for example a different machine but based on the same files), pass a path to the executable

dots deploy --config some_file.dots.toml

If you want to skip the hostname check:

dots --no-hostname-check --deploy 

Todo

• [x] Allow to "undeploy", eg. to automatically remove symlinks created by dots
• [x] Absolute Paths in dest field
• [x] Hostname condition for deployment
• [ ] Windows Support (should work in theory but I haven't tested it yet)

License

This is licensed under the MIT license.