stoic-dotfiles 🖇

Stoic is a CLI tool built using the Rust programming language. It aims to simplify the management of configuration files, also known as dotfiles, in a centralized manner. Drawing inspiration from the approach of the GNU stow utility, Stoic offers a flexible and efficient solution for organizing and deploying dotfiles across multiple systems.

With Stoic, users can effortlessly manage their dotfiles and maintain consistency across different environments. Whether you're a developer, sysadmin, or simply a power user, Stoic empowers you to streamline your configuration management workflow.

Key Features:

• Centralized Dotfile Management: Stoic allows you to keep all your dotfiles organized in a central directory, making it easy to version control and synchronize across multiple machines. No more scattered dotfiles across different locations!

• Simple and Intuitive CLI: Stoic provides a user-friendly command-line interface that makes dotfile management a breeze. It offers intuitive commands for adding, removing, and updating dotfiles, ensuring a seamless experience for both beginners and advanced users.

• Intelligent Symbolic Link Deployment: Stoic leverages symbolic links to deploy dotfiles to their respective locations. By creating symbolic links, the original dotfiles remain in the central directory, ensuring easy updates and preventing accidental file duplication.

• Customizable Configurations: Stoic understands that each user has unique requirements and preferences. It provides a configuration file where you can specify custom settings and behaviors to tailor Stoic to your specific needs.

Stoic aims to be a reliable and efficient tool for managing dotfiles, providing a robust foundation for maintaining a consistent and portable environment across different systems. It empowers users to focus on their work without worrying about the complexities of dotfile management, ultimately enabling them to be more productive and efficient.

Use case example

Assume Bob has a bunch of dotfiles he wishes to safely store in the cloud in order to be able to move his configs between machines. He then creates a directory my-configs and for each program he has a directory of the form my-configs/program where he may store its configs. In order to use stoic-dotfiles he first installs it from crates.io via

cargo install stoic-dotfiles

In order to correctly use stoic-dotfiles, Bob creates a file my-configs/dotfiles.toml where and each program can be configured using two variables:

• target_path: a string containing the path where the symlinks should be created. Such path can be either relative or absolute (the program also resolves paths starting with "~/").

  For instance, if Bob has a file ~/my-configs/nvim/init.vim and has

  [nvim]
  target_path = "~/.config/nvim"
  

  in his dotfiles.toml file, then after running

  cd ~/my-configs
  stoic-dotfiles
  

  the program creates a symlink

  ~/.config/nvim/init.lua -> ~/my-configs/nvim/init.lua
  

• is_recursive (optional): whether or not the program should create symlinks for subdirectories present in my-configs/program. If the variable isn't set, the program will assume that is_recursive = false.

  Suppose that Bob wants to recursively link his nvim configs and has a file ~/my-configs/nvim/plugins/lsp.lua and adds to his dotfiles.toml the following content:

  [nvim]
  target_path = "~/.config/nvim"
  is_recursive = true
  

  Then after running stoic-dotfiles inside ~/my-configs the program should create symlinks:

  ~/.config/nvim/init.lua -> ~/my-configs/nvim/init.lua
  ~/.config/nvim/plugins/lsp.lua -> ~/my-configs/nvim/plugins/lsp.lua
  

• config_path (optional): string containing the path to the configuration directory to be the source of the symlinks, if the variable isn't set, the program will assume that the relative path to dotfile.toml is "./key" for the corresponding [key] in the config file.

  For instance suppose Bob wants to store all his tmux-related configurations in a single directory but does not want all files to go be symlinked to the same relative target directory. He can obtain this by adding the following to his dotfiles.toml:

  [tmux]
  target_path = "~/.config/tmux"
  
  [tmux_scripts]
  config_path = "tmux/scripts"
  target_path = "~/.local/bin"