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

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 run cargo install dotter after installing rust to install it that way.

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 0.7.2
A small dotfile manager.

USAGE:
    dotter [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
        --dry-run     Dry run - don't do anything, only print information. Implies RUST_LOG=info unless specificed
                      otherwise
        --force       Force - instead of skipping, overwrite target files if their content is unexpected. Overrides
                      --dry-run and implies RUST_LOG=warn unless specified otherwise
    -h, --help        Prints help information
        --undeploy    Un-deploy - delete all deployed files in their target locations. Note that this operates on all
                      files that are currently in cache
    -V, --version     Prints version information

OPTIONS:
        --cache-directory <cache-directory>    Directory to cache into [default: dotter_settings/cache]
        --cache-file <cache-file>              Location of cache file [default: dotter_settings/cache.toml]
    -d, --directory <directory>                Do all operations relative to this directory [default: .]
    -g, --global-config <global-config>        Location of the global configuration [default:
                                               dotter_settings/global.toml]
    -l, --local-config <local-config>          Location of the local configuration [default: dotter_settings/local.toml]

Dotter uses the env_logger rust library for displaying errors and warnings. To configure logging level, use the RUST_LOG environment variable. The options are, in order of least verbose to most verbose: error, warn, info, debug, trace. The default is error.

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)