augustohp / ore

[Idea] Makes sharing and using multiple dotfiles easy

Ore: Merging dotfiles together

A way to provide (a simple standard) and merge (a program) dotfiles. Multiple repositories might need to affect the same file (e.g ~/.bashrc), Ore allows that.

Ore is two things:

1. A Standard for dotfiles repositories to follow and play nice together
2. A program to merge ore-compatible dotfiles together

The Standard

Every ore repository CAN be a castle, which means:

• They contain a home directory
• home contains files which will be symlinked to the user's home

Ore castles follow just one more rule:

• They don't have files which might be used by other castles

If you have a castle with .bashrc and want to provide it, append _<id> to the file name: .bashrc_phpbrew.

You can search for other Ore compatible repositories on GitHub.

The program

The ore command line is used to merge files from smaller ones:

$ ore ".ssh/config_*" > ~/.ssh/config

The execution above will find all files in your $HOME that start with .ssh/config_ and output its contents to ~/.ssh/config. ore just concatenate files and you are responsible for telling which file they will produce, a couple more examples:

$ ore ".bashrc_*" > ~/.bashrc
$ ore ".bash_environment_*" > ~/.bash_environment
$ ore ".vimrc_*" > ~/.vimrc

The files concatenated by ore are sorted, meaning .vimrc_00-pathogen is output before .vimrc_99-papercolor-colorscheme.

Automating things with hooks

A ore repository can help you by providing three hooks:

• pre-command and post-command are executed before or after ore
• load is used to automatically generate files provided by the repository

Hooks MUST be provided inside a .ore directory. If the repository is a castle, then it will have a home/.ore directory. A hook is a shell file that is executed by ore and follow the convention <when>_<_id>:

• when: Is either pre, post or load
• id is usually the name of your repository

Examples of hook files are: load_ssh_config_work, load_vim-pathogen, load_docker_aliases, pre_docker_aliases and post_docker_aliases.

Automatically merging files with load hook

The load hook is a text file with the file names provided by the repository after they are merged. If a repository provides ~/.vimrc and has a ~/.vimrc_nice-statusbar then the hook file content can be:

# ~/.ore/load_nice-statusbar
# Comments are ignored
ore "$HOME/.vimrc_* >> $HOME/.vimrc

The load hook is only used when you execute ore without any argument (or ore --only-load). All load hooks differ from pre and post hooks as their content is first read, merged together with all other load hook-scripts available so they can be de-duplicated.

Pre and Post hooks

This hooks must be executable, they can be a shell script or program that gets executed by ore if the user accepts the risks involved.

Installation

Ore is a single script program, just put it in your $PATH or:

$ sh <(curl -sSL http://git.io/sinister) -u http://git.io/ore

The above command, after executed, should provide you with a ore command which you will use. To check if installation was successful, you can:

$ ore --version
Ore 1.0.0

If this fails, please let me know.

ore's Issues

Request for comments

This is an idea to be used with homesick, allowing to use multiple dotfiles together.

As I am nearing a point where I feel comfortable coding something, there is still a lot of information on commit messages that are missing or lacking explanation in the README - such as TODOs and exploration of ideas that are just a glimpse.

Any opinion is valuable:

• How do you manage your dotfiles?
• How easy is to understand what is written in the README? What are your doubts?
• Would you use this? How would you use it?

To help you better understand what all the README explains, it is basically this sequence of commands:

$ find -depth 2 -name "config_*" ~/.ssh \
    | sort \ 
    > ~/.ssh/config

Publish https://git.io/ore short-url

This is needed as it is mentioned on the README.md file as installation instructions using Sinister.

• Have an sh file which I can link raw output to
• Create the permanent short-url