A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.—May Sarton
When you live in a command line, configurations are a deeply personal thing. They are often crafted over years of experience, battles lost, lessons learned, advice followed, and ingenuity rewarded. When you are away from your own configurations, you are an orphaned refugee in unfamiliar and hostile surroundings. You feel clumsy and out of sorts. You are filled with a sense of longing to be back in a place you know. A place you built. A place where all the short-cuts have been worn bare by your own travels. A place you proudly call... $HOME.
Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.—Ann Douglas
As so many others, I started out with a repository of dotfiles and a few scripts to symbolically link them around my home directory. This quickly became inadequate and I looked for solutions elsewhere. I've used two excellent tools; homeschick, and vcsh. These tools are great, and you should check them out to understand their strengths. However, I didn't find all of the features I personally wished for in a single tool. yadm was written with the following goals:
- Use a single repository
- Few dependencies
- Ability to use alternate files based on OS or host
- Ability to encrypt and track confidential files
- Stay out of the way and let Git do what it's good at
Seek home for rest, for home is best.—Thomas Tusser
yadm can be installed using Homebrew.
brew install yadm
Several yum repositories are on Copr. Follow this link for repositories and installation instructions.
yadm is available in the Arch User Repos and can be installed with AUR helper or Makepkg
yaourt -S yadm
yadm is available in the main gentoo portage tree, simply use emerge to
install it
emerge -atv app-admin/yadm
You can simply download the yadm script and put it into your $PATH. Something like this:
curl -fLo /usr/local/bin/yadm https://github.com/TheLocehiliosan/yadm/raw/master/yadm && chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/yadm
I would not change my blest estate for all the world calls good or great.—Isaac Watts
If you know how to use Git, then you already know how to use yadm. See the man page for a comprehensive explanation of commands and options.
Start out with an empty local repository
yadm init
yadm add <important file>
yadm commit
Eventually you will want to push the local repo to a remote.
yadm remote add origin <url>
yadm push -u origin master
This clone will attempt to merge your existing repository, but if it fails, it will do a reset instead and you'll have to decide best on how resolve the differences.
yadm clone <url>
yadm status
To feel at home, stay at home.—Clifton Fadiman
Where possible, you should try to use the same file on every system. Here are a few examples:
let OS=substitute(system('uname -s'),"\n","","")
if (OS == "Darwin")
" do something that only makes sense on a Mac
endif
# use reattach-to-user-namespace as the default command on OSX
if-shell "test -f /usr/local/bin/reattach-to-user-namespace" 'set -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l bash"'
system_type=$(uname -s)
if [ "$system_type" = "Darwin" ]; then
eval $(gdircolors $HOME/.dir_colors)
else
eval $(dircolors -b $HOME/.dir_colors)
fi
However, sometimes the type of file you are using doesn't allow for this type of logic. If a configuration can do an "include", you can include a specific alternate version using yadm. Consider these three files:
#---- .gitconfig -----------------
[log]
decorate = short
abbrevCommit = true
[include]
path = .gitconfig.local
#---- .gitconfig.local##Darwin ---
[user]
name = Tim Byrne
email = [email protected]
#---- .gitconfig.local##Linux ----
[user]
name = Dr. Tim Byrne
email = [email protected]
Configuring Git this way includes .gitconfig.local in the standard .gitconfig. yadm will automatically link the correct version based on the operation system. The bulk of your configurations can go in a single file, and you just put the exceptions in OS-specific files.
Of course, you can use yadm to manage completely separate files for different systems as well.
#---- .signature##
- Tim
#---- .signature##Darwin.host1
Sent from my MacBook
- Tim
#---- .signature##Linux.host2
Sincerely,
Dr. Tim Byrne
yadm will link the appropriate version for the current host, or use the default ## version.
We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.—Winston Churchill
Below is an example of how yadm can be used to manage SSH configurations. The example demonstrates yadm directly managing the config file, managing a host-specific authorized_keys file, and storing the private SSH key as part of its encrypted files. This example assumes a typical working SSH configuration exists, and walks through the steps to bring it under yadm's management.
yadm add ~/.ssh/config
mv ~/.ssh/authorized_keys ~/.ssh/authorized_keys##Linux.myhost
yadm add ~/.ssh/authorized_keys##Linux.myhost
echo '.ssh/id_rsa' >> ~/.yadm/encrypt
yadm add ~/.yadm/encrypt
yadm encrypt
------
yadm status
Changes to be committed:
(use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)
new file: .ssh/authorized_keys##Linux.myhost
new file: .ssh/config
new file: .yadm/encrypt
new file: .yadm/files.gpg
------
ls ~/.ssh
authorized_keys -> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys##Linux.myhost
authorized_keys##Linux.myhost
config
rsa_id
First, the config file is simply added. This will cause the same config file to be used on other yadm managed hosts. The authorized_keys file needs to be host specific, so rename the file using the OS and hostname. After adding the renamed authorized_keys##Linux.myhost, yadm will automatically create the symlink for it. Last, the private key should be maintained in yadm's encrypted files. Add a pattern to the .yadm/encrypt file which matches the private key. Then instruct yadm to encrypt all files matching the patterns found in .yadm/encrypt. Notice that the yadm repository is not tracking the private key directly, rather it tracks the collection of encrypted files .yadm/files.gpg. When these changes are brought onto another host, using the yadm decrypt command will extract the files stored.