Dotties

Dotties is a Mac tool for managing your dotfiles via GitHub.

Dotties packages are extensions that can be shared. Your entire dotfiles repo is a dotties package, so you can install it on multiple computers to keep your dotfiles in sync. You can also install extensions from others to enhance your own dotfiles. For example, the search behavior in .vimrc can be extracted as an extension which can be added to your existing configuration through dotties package management.

To get started check out my core file

How does it work?

Dotties package is just a collection of dotfiles such as vimrc, tmux.conf etc. Dotties will make sure that your config file and the package's config file are both included correctly.

In order to achieve this Dotties will create a single config file (say ~/.tmux.conf) that sources both your tmux.conf and your package's tmux.conf.

Files from the packages are installed in ~/.dotties/packages/${USERNAME-REPO} and are never modified by dotties, so feel free to update these files in place and commit them back to GitHub.

Insalling on OS X

You can install dotties from Homebrew.

brew install bayleeadamoss/formulae/dotties

Installing on Ubuntu

Install rvm

gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3
\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash
source /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh
rvm install ruby-2.2

Install dotties

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/bayleeadamoss/dotties-core.git
cd dotties-core/bin
mv ../lib /usr/local/bin/.dotties-lib
cat dotties | sed -e 's|../lib|.dotties-lib|g' > /usr/local/bin/dotties

Getting started

Create a repo on GitHub with your dotfiles inside of it.

Let's assume the directory structure looks like this:

dotfiles/
|-- vimrc
|-- tmux.conf

Dottie works with GitHub for package management, so any short GitHub url can be a dotties package. For instance https://github.com/bayleedev/dotties would be installed as bayleedev/dotties. So converting your current dotfiles into a dotties repo is seamless.

To install a repo simply run:

dotties install bayleedev/dotties

.dotties.yml

Optionally, you can have a .dotties.yml if you wish to include additional packages or you want to ignore files such as a readme or pictures of your dog.

A simple .dotties.yml might look lke this:

packages:
  - bayleeadamoss/dotties-vim-movements
ignore:
  - readme.md

This says that next time you install or update your dotfiles to ignore the readme.md file and to include the package bayleeadamoss/dotties-vim-movements.