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dotrs

A try on building a dotfiles manager which makes managing and synchronizing dotfiles across multiple systems as seamless and easy as possible.

Warning

This tool is currently under construction and thus neither feature-complete nor has it been field-tested enough to ensure a confident level of consistency and reliability.

Feature Roadmap

  • Import dotfiles from a remote repository
  • Apply dotfiles to home directory
  • Update dotfiles to remote directory
  • Service to automatically sync dotfiles with remote repository
  • Profiles and templating support
  • List currently tracked dotfiles (i.e. dotrs ls)
  • Value encryption in profiles

Installation

You can install dotrs either by downloading the precompiled binaries for your system configuration from the releases page, or by installing it from source by using cargo install.

cargo install dotrs

To be able to properly use the dotrs cd command, you can use the bin/wrapper-bash.sh script. Simply download it to your system and source it in your .profile.

curl -Lo /usr/local/bin/dotrs-wrapper.sh \
    "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shellshape/dotrs/refs/heads/main/bin/wrapper-bash.sh"
echo "source /usr/local/bin/dotrs-wrapper.sh" >> "$HOME/.profile"

Service Setup

The service is integrated into the same binary as the CLI and can simply be started with the dotrs start-service command. Configuration for the service can be passed wither via command line parameters or via environment variables. See dotrs start-service --help for more information.

In the service directory, you can find some configuration examples to run the dotrs service using systemd or launchd (macOS).

Concept

CLI Tool

dotrs uses a central Git repository as reference to share and synchronize dotfiles across your systems. You can import (or simply point dotrs via the config to an already cloned repository) a repository of dotfiles. These are stored in a stage directory. There, you can edit and modify your dotfiles and templates. From there, with the apply command, the templates are processed and the dotfiles are copied to your home directory. With the pull command, you can update your stage from the upstream repository. With the update command, you can commit your changes in the stage and push them to the upstream repository.

Service Module

But because we are all lazy and forget to actively pull, commit and sync our stuff, dotrs tries to do all that for you automatically with the provided service module, which is directly integrated into the tool and can be started with the start-service command. Example service configuration is also available in the service/ directory. The service watches the stage directory for changes and applies them automatically to your home directory. Also, after a debounce period, changes are automatically committed and pushed from the stage to the upstream repository. Also, periodically, the service pulls changes from the upstream repository into the stage directory and applies them, so that your dotfiles are always up-to-date across devices.

Profiles

dotrs features profiles and templating. You can create profiles by creating a .dotrs-profiles directory in your dotfiles repository. There, you can create a <profile-name>.yaml file, which can be applied on your dotfiles with the dotrs apply --profile <profile-name> command. Profile files contain variables which then are substituted into your dotfiles using the Handlebars templating language.

Note

The Rust implementation of handlebars used in this project only supports a subset of handlebars. Please refer to the handlebars-rust crate documentation for more information.