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git dotfiles synchronizer written in bash

homeshick In Unix, configuration files are king. Tailoring tools to suit your needs through configuration can be empowering. An immense number of hours is spent on getting these adjustments just right, but once you leave the con
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Category: Linux / Shell Package Management
Watchers: 57
Star: 2k
Fork: 150
Last update: Nov 29, 2023
Resource links
https://github.com/andsens/homeshick

homeshick Build Status

In Unix, configuration files are king.
Tailoring tools to suit your needs through configuration can be empowering.
An immense number of hours is spent on getting these adjustments just right, but once you leave the confines of your own computer, these local optimizations are left behind.

By the power of git, homeshick enables you to bring the symphony of settings you have poured your heart into with you to remote computers. With it you can begin to focus even more energy on bettering your work environment since the benefits are reaped on whichever machine you are using.

However bare bones these machines are, provided that at least Bash 3 and Git 1.5 are available you can use homeshick. homeshick can handle multiple dotfile repositories. This means that you can install larger frameworks like oh-my-zsh or a multitude of emacs or vim plugins alongside your own customizations without clutter.

For detailed installation instructions, tutorials and tips & tricks have a look at the wiki.

Quick install

homeshick is installed to your own home directory and does not require root privileges to be installed.

git clone https://github.com/andsens/homeshick.git $HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick

Note: If you'd like to help testing new features before they are released use git clone --branch testing https://...

To invoke homeshick, source the homeshick.sh script from your rc-script:

# from sh and its derivates (bash, dash, ksh, zsh etc.)
printf '\nsource "$HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick/homeshick.sh"' >> $HOME/.bashrc
# csh and derivatives (i.e. tcsh)
printf '\nalias homeshick source "$HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick/homeshick.csh"\n' >> $HOME/.cshrc
# fish shell
echo \n'source "$HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick/homeshick.fish"' >> "$HOME/.config/fish/config.fish"

Contributing

Before submitting pull requests or reporting bugs, please make sure to read the contribution guidelines.

14 Open More issues
Closed

zsh completion is not working

I followed zsh completion instructions detailed in the wiki but it doesn't work at all...

Am I missing something?

EDIT by @andsens: Since this issue seems to be visited a lot, here's the solution (for this specific case, that is. If something else works for you, feel free to add a comment to the issue)

opened Apr 16, 2014 by waiting-for-dev 28
Closed

Option to symlink files and not whole directories

homeshick seems to look at the first depth level of files (including directories) in the home/ directory of a castle and replace instances of those in the user's home/ directory by symlinks. However the castle files might only consist of a subset of the files that can be originally found in the user's directory and symlinking the directory wholesale would erase configuration files that the user might want to keep.

Ok, an example to make that clear :):

On linux a lot of configuration settings are stored in ~/.config/ . With the way symlinks are generated now we can't pick and choose the files to symlink in ~/.config/. homeshick attempts to replace the whole ~/.config/ directory, but this is problematic if we only want to sync sublime text settings for instance and not touch any of the other application settings.

One solution could be to only symlink files or maybe a prompt for partial symlinking. I think this issue might be general enough to not just be "feature creep". Hopefully that was clear!

enhancement 
opened Apr 29, 2013 by fenekku 26
Closed

Only symlink files that are tracked by git

When a file is ignored by git in a castle, it should not be symlinked into $HOME. This would also allow the removal of the .git folders and files pruning when listing the castle contents, since those files are ignored by git per default.

However: git check-ignore was only added in git 1.8.2, the change should only affect that version and upwards.

This would also fix #94.

enhancement fixed in dev 
opened Apr 22, 2014 by andsens 22
Closed

Add cd command to enter castle

Add a homeshick cd CASTLE command so users can easily enter a castle and do git stuff. Not sure whether pushd should be used instead though? This way users can write popd to get back to where they were.

enhancement 
opened May 11, 2013 by andsens 22
Closed

Fix parse_url for repos with dots in name

The regex that was being used in parse_url searched until a slash (/) or dot (.) was found and then looked for an optional (.git) at the end. This caused problems with repo names like vim-scripts/ebnf.vim.git and actually caused the clone command to put the repo into a strange "git://" directory structure.

This commit handles both urls with and without a dot in the name by selecting everything in the url after the final / as the repo name.

bug 
opened Nov 1, 2013 by nastevens 21
Closed

`check` should check for dirty working copy

It should be possible to see whether the working copy of a castle is dirty by running check.

enhancement 
opened Sep 21, 2013 by andsens 17
Open

Clone/pull on large repositories/submodules: Recursion and depth

Thanks for your project Anders. I've just started using Homeshick and find it really useful (still WIP: https://github.com/gerardbosch/dotfiles)

I see the homeshick clone and homeshick pull commands initializes recursively submodules.

  • In case of clone: git clone --recursive
  • In case of pull: git pull && git submodule update --recursive --init

Do you think it would make sense to perform the following with --depth=1 instead?

  • clone case: git clone && git submodule update --init --recursive --depth=1 (here clone and update are split to achieve depth=1)
  • pull case: git pull && git submodule update --init --recursive --depth=1

(I'm not very sure if other commands would be affected).

Rationale:

Sometimes submodules can come with a huge history, adding unnecessary MB.

I see that for example, Zsh package manager Antigen, clones packages (they call them bundles) by doing --depth=1. I've thought it may make sense for Homeshick as well.

For example, I added bash-it as a submodule to my dotfiles. In the Github's bash-it README, they instruct you to clone the project with --depth=1. The problem here is that now that this submodule sits in my dot files, it grows from 4,8MB to 44MB if I do homeshick pull (or if I do homeshick clone in another account/machine). This is just an example, but will happen with any other project with heavy-sized histories OR heavy recursive modules.

I could provide a PR if necessary.

--

I also have a side question (more anecdotically): Do you know if is there any way to configure Git to "ignore initialization" of certain submodules (like test libraries) on git submodule update? Following the same example, bash-it comes with some other submodules for testing the project:

bash-it/test_lib/bats-assert
bash-it/test_lib/bats-core
bash-it/test_lib/bats-file
bash-it/test_lib/bats-support

I mean, nested submodules in repos that are out of my control. I guess adding ignore = dirty and update = none in its .gitmodules would make it, but not very sure.

They are lightweight in this case (even though could be not), but I don't think I actually need these test dependencies (they are actually not initialized if I just do git clone .../bash-it.git). Maybe this would be already mitigated also using the --depth=1 in homeshick clone/pull.

Thanks!

enhancement 
opened Apr 27, 2020 by gerardbosch 2
Open

Add dry run mode

Would be great being able to dry-run some commands, especially link in order to make sure of what would happen before it actually does.

homeshick link --dry-run

enhancement 
opened Jan 24, 2019 by artivis 2
Open

Add support to execute .homeshickrc bash script

From the homesick readme:

If you need to add further configuration steps you can add these in a file called '.homesickrc' in the root of a castle. Once you've cloned a castle with a .homesickrc run the configuration with: homesick rc CASTLE The contents of the .homesickrc file must be valid Ruby code as the file will be executed with Ruby's eval construct. The .homesickrc is also passed the current homesick object during its execution and this is available within the .homesickrc file as the 'self' variable. As the rc operation can be destructive the command normally asks for confirmation before proceeding. You can bypass this by passing the '--force' option, for example homesick rc --force CASTLE.

Would there be any interest to add the same thing to homeshick, in form of a bash script named .homeshickrc at the root of a castle?

enhancement 
opened Aug 12, 2017 by FlorianFranzen 5
Open

Add ability to link untracked files

PR #113 brought up the issue of being able to link untracked files. Here are two use cases:

The motivation for this is that I have some dotfiles that are untracked by git since they contain private information but which I still want to link. Also, when I'm working on my emacs configuration I sometimes have new files that I don't want to track right away but there's no way to link them easily since they're inside a submodule.

enhancement 
opened Oct 12, 2014 by andsens 3
Open

Ability to unlink

Homesick offers the ability to remove symlinks: You can remove symlinks anytime when you don't need them anymore homesick unlink CASTLE

Would anybody be interested in having the same functionality in this repo?

enhancement 
opened Oct 10, 2014 by adam-beck 7
Open

Support Semantic Versioning

We need to support a semantic versioning update system for homshick in order to mitigate the risk of breaking user's castles with a major release (i.e. potential breaking changes). In essence we need to change the way pull works with homeshick. If the new version homeshick that is being pulled is a new major version (breaks backwards compatibility). It would prompt the user, that there are major breaking changes and that they should read the change log before updating. After they've done so they may homeshick update.

I'm impartial as to the homeshick update command idea. A better idea might be prompting the user whether or not we should continue with the pull if it is a major release. This would require that the pull command have an -f where it wouldn't prompt for version changes.

We should implement this feature with convention. So that it can be applied to any castle. Maybe it could use a VERSION txt file in the root of the repo that would be a semantic version to check.

enhancement 
opened Apr 24, 2014 by squaresurf 10

v2.0.1(Apr 14, 2023)

New version per request of @oreinert in https://github.com/andsens/homeshick/pull/213.
This is a minor release with no breaking changes.

Changes:

  • Improvements to testing (@oreinert)
  • Test up to and including bash v5.2.9
  • Improvements to cd and check subcommands (@me-and)
  • Improvement to cd subcommand in fish (@languitar)

v2.0.0(May 13, 2020)

New version per request of @oreinert in #197. The major version has been bumped because of a breaking change.

Notable changes:

  • Breaking: Removed ./bin/homeshick.csh (moved to ./homeshick.csh)
  • Speed up refresh operation by reducing exec calls (thanks to @kruton)
  • Fix some path quoting issues

v1.1.0(Jun 4, 2018)

New version per request of @oreinert in #180.
Notable changes:

  • symlinks are now relative (useful when linking for a chrooted environment or when renaming the home folder)
  • fish shell completion (guide in wiki)
  • homeshick.sh can now be sourced from dash as well
  • the entire codebase is now linted with shellcheck
  • loads of minor bugfixes

Contents

    LittleboyHarry Build your dotfiles using makefile and git merge from modular source code!
    pums974 Automatic synchronizer of subtitles based on voice activity in the video
    rtomayko A customized bash environment suitable for git work.
    riobard Powerline-style Bash prompt in pure Bash script. See also https://github.com/riobard/zsh-powerline
    zombieleet A unit testing framework written in bash for bash scripts
    svetlyak40wt Shell agnostic git based dotfiles package manager, written in Python.
    posener bash completion written in go + bash completion for go command
    twolfson Bash prompt with colors, git statuses, and git branches.
    niieani Bash Infinity is a modern boilerplate / framework / standard library for bash
    nikita-skobov A bash script designed to create other bash scripts with argument parsing
    momeni Customized bash environment, making git folders more friendly.
    sobolevn A bash-tool to store your private data inside a git repository.
    akinomyoga Bash Line Editor (ble.sh) is a command line editor written in pure Bash scripts which replaces the default GNU Readline.
    xlwings Git extension: Makes git-diff and git-merge work for Excel workbooks (xls* file types)
    suin Never forget to git commit and push
    golbin A git tool with an easy terminal interface.
    dzove855 A purely bash web server, no socat, netcat, etc...
    magicmonty An informative and fancy bash prompt for Git users
    KrauseFx Learning the difference between > and >>
    Wafelack RDFM - The Rusty DotFiles Manager
    th1nhhdk r/unixporn dotfiles
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