What is Dotter?

Dotter is a dotfile manager and templater.

Dotfiles are configuration files that usually live in the home directory and start with a dot. Often times, it is desirable to have a backup of all the configurations on your system, which is why a lot of users have their dotfiles saved in a git repository, then symlinking them to their target locations using ln -s.

However, there are several issues with that barebones approach:

• Hard to keep track of what comes from where once you have more than a handful of dotfiles
• Tedious to setup on a new machine - you need to manually create every single link
• No real way to handle differences between machines - say you want the battery meter on your bar to not appear on your desktop machine

Dotter aims to solve all those problems by providing a flexible configuration and automatic templating or symlinking to the target locations.

⚠️ THIS PROJECT IS UNDER HEAVY DEVELOPMENT. I use it regularly myself so it's reasonably tested, but expect bugs to happen. If you find a bug, please open an issue describing how to reproduce it, and it will get fixed.
I create Releases often so make sure you check whether the bug was fixed in the latest one!

Installation

Arch Linux

The following AUR packages are available:

• dotter-rs-bin for a precompiled version of the latest release
• dotter-rs for the latest release's source that is built on your machine
• dotter-rs-git for the latest commit on master that is built on your machine

All of those are maintained by orhun - huge thanks to him!

Windows

Dotter is available on Scoop. Run scoop install dotter to install the latest release.

Others

Download the binary for your platform from the latest release and then put it in your $PATH or in your dotfile repository (then you'd run it with ./dotter). Alternatively, Dotter is on crates.io, so if you have Rustup installed, run cargo install dotter.

Wiki

Check out the wiki for more information. Among other things, it explains how to setup and configure Dotter, as well as giving insight on how the templating and deployment works.

Usage

Now that you've configured all the global and local file sections, you can simply run dotter from within your repository.
All the files will be deployed to their target locations.

Check out dotter -h for the command-line flags that Dotter supports:

Dotter 0.12.9
A small dotfile manager

USAGE:
    dotter [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] [SUBCOMMAND]

FLAGS:
    -d, --dry-run      Dry run - don't do anything, only print information. Implies -v at least once
    -f, --force        Force - instead of skipping, overwrite target files if their content is unexpected. Overrides
                       --dry-run
    -h, --help         Prints help information
    -y, --noconfirm    Assume "yes" instead of prompting when removing empty directories
    -p, --patch        Take standard input as an additional files/variables patch, added after evaluating `local.toml`.
                       Assumes --noconfirm flag because all of stdin is taken as the patch
    -q, --quiet        Quiet - only print errors
    -V, --version      Prints version information
    -v, --verbose      Verbosity level - specify up to 3 times to get more detailed output. Specifying at least once
                       prints the differences between what was before and after Dotter's run

OPTIONS:
        --cache-directory <cache-directory>          Directory to cache into [default: .dotter/cache]
        --cache-file <cache-file>                    Location of cache file [default: .dotter/cache.toml]
        --diff-context-lines <diff-context-lines>
            Amount of lines that are printed before and after a diff hunk [default: 3]

    -g, --global-config <global-config>              Location of the global configuration [default: .dotter/global.toml]
    -l, --local-config <local-config>                Location of the local configuration [default: .dotter/local.toml]
        --post-deploy <post-deploy>
            Location of optional post-deploy hook [default: .dotter/post_deploy.sh]

        --post-undeploy <post-undeploy>
            Location of optional post-undeploy hook [default: .dotter/post_undeploy.sh]

        --pre-deploy <pre-deploy>
            Location of optional pre-deploy hook [default: .dotter/pre_deploy.sh]
        --pre-undeploy <pre-undeploy>
            Location of optional pre-undeploy hook [default: .dotter/pre_undeploy.sh]


SUBCOMMANDS:
    deploy      Deploy the files to their respective targets. This is the default subcommand
    help        Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    init        Initialize global.toml with a single package containing all the files in the current directory
                pointing to a dummy value and a local.toml that selects that package
    undeploy    Delete all deployed files from their target locations. Note that this operates on all files that are
                currently in cache
    watch       Run continuously, watching the repository for changes and deploying as soon as they happen. Can be
                ran with `--dry-run`

Contributing

Contributions to Dotter are welcome, whether in the form of a pull request or an issue (for bug repots, feature requests, or other helpful comments)

Support

Like what I do and want to encourage me to continue?
You can donate a small amount via Paypal.
Donations are not expected but greatly appreciated.