In my effort to re-write and simplify this little gem, I have made a discovery. It is much easier to manage dotfiles and configuration manually and on a per-system basis. I have not even needed to touch this gem for personal use except once since the release of v0.6.6 and have spent the last 6 months only realizing that there is not much that this gem can provide that you cannot achieve yourself with little extra effort.

Dotify is a simple CLI tool to make managing dotfiles on your system easy. When developing on a Linux/Unix-based system, keeping track of all of those dotfiles in the home directory can be pain. Some developers do not even bother managing them and many have come up with their own static or even dynamic way of managing them. This is a need in the community, and this tool makes managing these crazy files a breeze.

As this is a gem for use on your local system, I know there are still many Ruby developers still stuck with using Ruby 1.8. As such, Dotify supports the following Ruby versions:

• 1.9.3
• 1.9.2
• 1.8.7

Note: As of v0.7.0, JRuby and Rubinius are now only partially supported. Trying to support all of these versions is quite difficult with the nature of this gem, so I will be focusing on MRI.

Run this command in the command line to install Dotify:

$ gem install dotify

To install Dotify, you must first run dotify install in your terminal.

$ dotify install
    create /Users/computer-user/.dotify
    create /Users/computer-user/.dotrc
Editing config file...
Do you want to link .bashrc to the home directory? [Yn] n
    linked  /Users/computer-user/.bashrc
Do you want to link .dotrc to the home directory? [Yn] n
    linked  /Users/computer-user/.dotrc
Do you want to add .railsrc to Dotify? [Yn] n
    linked  /Users/computer-user/.railsrc
Do you want to add .zshrc to Dotify? [Yn] n
    linked  /Users/computer-user/.zshrc
...

This will first create a .dotify directory in your home directory as well as a .dotrc file for Dotify configuration (yes, it is more dotfiles, but this is a good thing!).

During the installation process, a Vim instance will open with a sample .dotrc file for you to edit and configure if you desire. This will allow your configuration to be used prior to Dotify's full installation. See more about the .dotrc file in the Configuration section.

Alternatively, you could run dotify setup to setup Dotify's configuration, followed by dotify install to add the initial files into Dotify.

Already have your setup on Github and want it back (or copied to your other machine)? See another setup that you want to try? Run the github task with the username and repo you want.

For example:

$ dotify github mattdbridges/dots
Pulling mattdbridges/dots from Github into /Users/computer-user/.dotify...
Backing up dotfile and installing Dotify files...
Successfully installed mattdbridges/dots from Github!

This command will pull the repo from Github into the ~/.dotify path if it does not already exist. It will then backup any existing dotfiles matching those in the new ~/.dotify directory and link all the files you just pulled down from Github. If Dotify detects that you have submodules (inside of your Vim configuration for example), it will automatically initialize and update them (not pull them from the original repos).

You may not actually be using Github. Easy. Just use the repo task and give it the full git url.

$ dotify repo git://github.com/mattdbridges/dots.git
Pulling git://github.com/mattdbridges/dots.git from Github into /Users/computer-user/.dotify...
Backing up dotfile and installing Dotify files...
Successfully installed git://github.com/mattdbridges/dots.git from Github!

After you have setup Dotify, you can add files one by one if you did not add them during setup.

$ dotify link .vimrc
    linked  /Users/computer-user/.vimrc

No one likes to go and look for the symlinks of their dotfiles manually. Just check to see which files are being managed by Dotify by running dotify list.

$ dotify list
Dotify is managing 13 files:

   * .bash_profile
   * .dotrc
   * .gemrc
   * .gitconfig
   * .gitignore_global
...

Don't want any of the dotfiles anymore? Or want to drop one? Well, I'm not one to question. Go ahead and move them back into the home directory.

$ dotify unlink
Do you want to unlink .bash_profile from the home directory? [Yn] Y
    unlinked  /Users/computer-user/.bash_profile
Do you want to unlink .dotrc from the home directory? [Yn] Y
    unlinked  /Users/computer-user/.dotrc
Do you want to unlink .gemrc from the home directory? [Yn]
...

Should you run this task and decide to change your mind, you can simply run dotify link or dotify link [FILE] again if you want to restore your changes.

By default, unlink loops through all of the Dotify files. You can also pass a filename to unlink to unlink a single file.

$ dotify unlink .bashrc
Are you sure you want to remove ~/.bashrc? [Yn] Y
    unlinked  /Users/computer-user/.bashrc

The whole purpose of this gem was to manage the dotfiles on your system. What better way to do this than under version control using Git and Github?

• To version your Dotify installation, simple make .dotify a Git repository. If you don't know how to do that, I recommend you start reading here.
• Add your remote repository via git remote add [NAME] [REPO].

From this point, you can manage your dotfiles entirely from Dotify.

• To edit a dotfile managed by Dotify, simple run dotify edit [DOTFILE] and replace [DOTFILE] with the name of the file you want to edit. This will open a Vim instance containing that file for editing.
• Once you have saved your edits, simple run dotify save and Dotify will walk you through the steps of committing your changes and pushing them up to Github.

The .dotrc file in your home directory serves as the configuration file for Dotify. It is a YAML formatted file.

When you run dotify edit [DOTFILE], by default the file opens in Vim for editing. You can change this by adding this following to your .dotrc file.

editor: 'vi'
# or 'vim' or 'emacs' etc...

Vim and Emacs are the only two editors that have been successfully used with this configuration option, but if you find another, please let me know and I will update the documentation.

When you are linking files in your Dotify directory, some files you do not want ever want to link (.git, .gitmodules, .gitignore, .etc) because they are used specifically for that directory (such as git versioning). You can configure Dotify to ignore these files when calling dotify link in the .dotrc in this way:

$ cat ~/.dotrc
ignore:
  dotify:
  - '.git'
  - '.gitmodules'
  - '.gitignore'

The same can be done for the home directory when running dotify setup. There are some directories that you should not move around (.dropbox, .rbenv, .rvm) and do not want to accidentally attempt to move. You can do that in your .dotrc file as well:

$ cat ~/.dotrc
ignore:
  dotfiles:
  - '.dropbox'
  - '.rbenv'
  - '.rvm'

More configuration options will likely be added in future versions, so be sure to check up here for your options.

This tool is powered by the amazing library, Thor. You can use the help task like so:

$ dotify help
Tasks:
  dotify edit [FILE]               # Edit a dotify file
  dotify github [USERNAME]/[REPO]  # Install the dotfiles from a Github repo into Dotify. (Backs up any files that would be overwritten)
  dotify help [TASK]               # Describe available tasks or one specific task
  dotify install                   # Install files from your home directory into Dotify
  dotify link [[FILENAME]]         # Link up one or all of your dotfiles (FILENAME is optional)
  dotify list                      # List the installed dotfiles
  dotify save                      # Save Dotify files and push to Github.
  dotify setup                     # Setup your system for Dotify to manage your dotfiles
  dotify unlink [[FILENAME]]       # Unlink one or all of your dotfiles (FILENAME is optional)
  dotify version                   # Check your Dotify version

This tool is developed with much influence from 37singals' fantastic idea of Do Less. This is meant to be a simple tool.

Contributions are welcome and encouraged. The contrubution process is the typical Github one.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request