Homemaker

Homemaker is a tool for straightforward and efficient management of *nix configuration files found in the user's home directory, commonly known as dot-files. It is written in Golang, requires no installation, has no dependencies and makes use of simple configuration file format inspired by make to generate symlinks and execute system commands to aid in configuring a new system for use.

Motivation

Ever since switching to using Linux as my daily driver operating system, I have been searching for a way to effectively manage settings between different computers (and system reinstalls on the same machine) while avoiding the accumulation of cruft that plagues our home directories.

Specifically, I required a solution that had the following characteristics:

• Do not require software installation

  The user may not have root privileges on all the computers that she accesses, making it difficult to make use software that has additional dependencies. Even if the user has root on the machine in question, it is sub-optimal to require her to install software packages just to bootstrap the system.

• Support configuration variants

  The user should be able to use cherry-pick which settings they wish to use. Different system installs have different configuration requirements; it must be possible to share common settings while keeping the unique bits unique to each machine. Furthermore, it should be possible to store all configuration settings in one location.

• Make no assumptions about synchronization

  While Git often works well for managing dot-files, it is not ideal for every situation. I've seen some applications add and remove seemingly randomly-named files within their configuration directories, while others store their settings in large, opaque binary blobs. Managing configuration settings for such poorly-behaved applications may be easier through, Dropbox, rsync, or some other utility outside of version control.

• Be easy to read and modify the source

  As a programmer, I always consider the underlying technology of a tool when deciding whether or not to use it. The user should feel empowered to change and test the application without having to deal with the archaic incantations otherwise known as shell scripts. Scripting languages can work well but are closely tied to the environment in which they are executed.

It became apparent to me that utility which I was looking for did not exist. After making due with a simple Python script that I hacked together, I decided that this problem deserved a clean, formal solution. I decided to create this new utility in Go; in addition to the language itself being clear and easy to understand, executables built with the Go compiler are statically linked, making them highly portable. The result of my work is Homemaker; I hope that you find it suitable for your needs.

Installation

If you already have the Go environment and toolchain set up, you can get the latest version by running:

go get github.com/FooSoft/homemaker

Otherwise, you can use the pre-built binaries for the architectures below:

• linux amd64
• linux 386

Configuration

Configuration files for Homemaker can be authored in your choice of TOML, YAML or JSON markup languages. Being the easiest to read out of the three, TOML will be used for the example configuration files. Worry not if you are unfamiliar with this format; everything you need to know about it will be shown below.

Let's start by looking at a basic example configuration file, example.toml. Notice that Homemaker determines which markdown language processor to use based on the extension of your configuration file. Use .toml for TOML, .yaml for YAML, and .json for JSON. Having a wrong file extension will prevent your configuration file from being parsed correctly.

[tasks.default]
    links = [
        [".config/fish"],
        [".config/keepassx"],
        [".config/terminal"],
        [".config/vlc"],
        [".gitconfig"],
        [".xinputrc"],
    ]

We could have just as easily written this configuration in JSON (or YAML for that matter), but it's subjectively uglier:

{
    "tasks": {
        "default": {
            "links": [
                [".config/fish"],
                [".config/keepassx"],
                [".config/terminal"],
                [".config/vlc"],
                [".gitconfig"],
                [".xinputrc"]
            ]
        }
    }
}

To create symlinks based on this configuration we invoke the homemaker utility:

homemaker example.json /mnt/data/config

To get a better idea of what /mnt/data/config is, let's look at the in-program documentation:

Usage: homemaker [options] conf [src]

Parameters:
  -clobber=false: delete files and directories at target
  -dest="/home/alex": target directory for tasks
  -force=true: create parent directories to target
  -task="default": name of task to execute
  -verbose=false: verbose output

For the purpose of our illustration, src is defined on the command line to be /mnt/data/config; namely the source directory where your dot-files live (this will be your Git repository, Dropbox folder, rsync root, etc.). The symlinks that Homemaker creates will point to the configuration files in this directory. You may have noticed that you can also provide a destination directory via the -dest command line argument; this is where the symlinks should be created (and it defaults to your home directory).

Another useful parameter is task; it will be initialized to the value default unless you override it on the command line. In practice, this means that Homemaker will try to find a task called default and execute it. You can create as many unique tasks as necessary to correspond to your configuration requirements, and then choose which one will execute by specifying it on the command line in the format -task=taskname. Good candidates for tasks are computer names, as shown in the configuration file below:

[tasks.flatline]
    links = [
        [".config/syncthing", ".config/syncthing_flatline"],
        [".s3cfg"],
        [".sabnzbd"],
        [".ssh", ".ssh_flatline"],
    ]

[tasks.wintermute]
    links = [
        [".config/syncthing", ".config/syncthing_wintermute"],
        [".ssh", ".ssh_wintermute"],
    ]

Here we see two tasks, named after the computers that will be using them, flatline and wintermute. Certain configuration data like key pairs and other per-machine settings should only be linked on the computer that is using them. That is to say if flatline and wintermute both try to manage the .ssh directory, a conflict will occur at both the source and destination directories. We can easily resolve the source directory conflict by giving the .ssh directories unique names, such as .ssh_flatline and .ssh_wintermute. The conflict at the destination directory can be fixed as shown above; we will create per-machine tasks that will symlink only the needed directory.

You may have noticed that each entry in the links collection is an array, which up until now has contained only one item. A second item can be added if the source file or directory name is different from that in the destination. If the paths provided are relative they will be assumed to be relative to the destination and source directories respectively.

Now that we have machine specific tasks defined in our configuration file, it would be nice to still be able to share configuration settings that are common to the two computers. We can do this by adding a dep array to our tasks as shown below:

[tasks.common]
    links = [
        [".config/fish"],
        [".config/keepassx"],
        [".config/terminal"],
        [".config/vlc"],
        [".gitconfig"],
        [".xinputrc"],
    ]

[tasks.flatline]
    deps = ["common"]
    links = [
        [".config/syncthing", ".config/syncthing_flatline"],
        [".s3cfg"],
        [".sabnzbd"],
        [".ssh", ".ssh_flatline"],
    ]

[tasks.wintermute]
    deps = ["common"]
    links = [
        [".config/syncthing", ".config/syncthing_wintermute"],
        [".ssh", ".ssh_wintermute"],
    ]

Homemaker will process the dependency tasks before processing the task itself.

In addition to creating links, Homemaker is capable of executing commands on a per-task basis. Commands should be defined in an array called cmds, split into an item per each command line argument. All of the commands are executed with dest as the working directory (as mentioned previously, this defaults to your home directory). If any command returns a nonzero exit code, Homemaker will display an error message and stop.

The example task below will clone and install configuration files for Vim into the .config directory, and create links to it from the home directory.

[tasks.vim]
    cmds = [
        ["rm", "-rf", ".config/vim"],
        ["git", "clone", "https://github.com/FooSoft/dotvim", ".config/vim"],
        ["ln", "-sf", ".config/vim/.vimrc"],
        ["ln", "-sf", ".config/vim/.vim"],
    ]

Parameters

Executing Homemaker with the -help command line argument will trigger online help to be displayed. The list below provides a more detailed description of what the parameters do.

• clobber

  By default, Homemaker will only remove identically-named symlinks at the destination directory. Using this parameter will cause Homemaker to be more aggressive and delete clashing files and entire directories as well. This can be useful for getting rid of the default configuration settings some applications write when you run them for the first time, but should obviously be used with caution.

• dest

  This parameter specifies destination where Homemaker is to create symlinks. This will default to the home directory for the current user, and as long as you are just using this application to manage dot-files, will probably never need to be changed.

• force

  Sometimes dot-files for an application are nested within parent directories that must exist in order to allow the symlink to be successfully created (for example the .config directory in .config/vlc). As this is the expected behavior, this parameter defaults to true; however you can explicitly disable it if required. You can specify the access permissions of directories created by force by providing a third array item in the link descriptor. For example, if you wanted the .ssh directory to be created with mode 700, you could write the following: [".ssh/id_rsa.pub", ".ssh_flatline/id_rsa.pub", 0700]. Notice that you can specify permissions in octal notation by adding a leading zero value (the 0x prefix signifies hexadecimal).

• task

  This parameter is used to specify which task Homemaker will process when executed. It defaults to the default task, which should be used when creating a configuration file that does not have system-specific tasks specified.

• verbose

  When something isn't going the way you expect, you can use this parameter to make Homemaker to log everything it is doing to console.