vcsh - manage config files in $HOME via fake bare git repositories
Index
- Contact
- Introduction
- Overview
- Getting Started
- Usage
1 Contact
There are several ways to get in touch with the author and a small but committed community around the general idea of version controlling your (digital) life.
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IRC: #vcs-home on irc.oftc.net
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Mailing list: http://lists.madduck.net/listinfo/vcs-home
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Pull requests or issues on https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh
2 Introduction
vcsh allows you to have several git repositories, all maintaining their working trees in $HOME without clobbering each other. That, in turn, means you can have one repository per config set (zsh, vim, ssh, etc), picking and choosing which configs you want to use on which machine.
vcsh was designed with [mr] 1 in mind so you might want to install that, as well.
Read INSTALL.md for detailed setup instructions.
The following overview will try to give you an idea of the use cases and advantages of vcsh. See sections 3 and 4 for detailed instructions and examples.
2.1 Talks
Some people found it useful to look at slides and videos explaining how vcsh works. They can all be found at here.
3 Overview
3.1 Comparison to Other Solutions
Most people who decide to put their dotfiles under version control start with a single repository in $HOME, adding all their dotfiles (and possibly more) to it. This works, of course, but can become a nuisance as soon as you try to manage more than one host.
The next logical step is to create single-purpose repositories in, for example, ~/.dotfiles and to create symbolic links in $HOME. This gives you the flexibility to check out only certain repositories on different hosts. The downsides of this approach are the necessary manual steps of cloning and symlinking the individual repositories. It will probably become a nuisance when you try to manage more than two hosts.
vcsh takes this second approach one step further. It expects single-purpose repositories and stores them in a hidden directory (similar to ~/.dotfiles). However, it does not create symbolic links in $HOME; it puts the actual files right into $HOME.
Furthermore, by making use of [mr] 1, it makes it very easy to enable/disable and clone a large number of repositories. The use of mr is technically optional (see 4.3), but it will be an integral part of the proposed system that follows.
3.2 Default Directory Layout
To illustrate, this is what a possible directory structure looks like.
$HOME
|-- $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (defaults to $HOME/.config)
| |-- mr
| | |-- available.d
| | | |-- zsh.vcsh
| | | |-- gitconfigs.vcsh
| | | |-- lftp.vcsh
| | | |-- offlineimap.vcsh
| | | |-- s3cmd.vcsh
| | | |-- tmux.vcsh
| | | |-- vim.vcsh
| | | |-- vimperator.vcsh
| | | `-- snippets.git
| | `-- config.d
| | |-- zsh.vcsh -> ../available.d/zsh.vcsh
| | |-- gitconfigs.vcsh -> ../available.d/gitconfigs.vcsh
| | |-- tmux.vcsh -> ../available.d/tmux.vcsh
| | `-- vim.vcsh -> ../available.d/vim.vcsh
| `-- vcsh
| |-- config
| `-- repo.d
| |-- zsh.git -----------+
| |-- gitconfigs.git |
| |-- tmux.git |
| `-- vim.git |
|-- [...] |
|-- .zshrc <----------------------+
|-- .gitignore.d
| `-- zsh
|-- .mrconfig
`-- .mrtrustavailable.d
The files you see in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mr/available.d are mr configuration files that contain the commands to manage (checkout, update etc.) a single repository. vcsh repo configs end in .vcsh, git configs end in .git, etc. This is optional and your preference. For example, this is what a zsh.vcsh with read-only access to my zshrc repo looks likes. I.e. in this specific example, push can not work as you will be using the author's repository. This is for demonstration, only. Of course, you are more than welcome to clone from this repository and fork your own.
[$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/vcsh/repo.d/zsh.git]
checkout = vcsh clone 'git://github.com/RichiH/zshrc.git' zsh
update = vcsh run zsh git pull
push = vcsh run zsh git push
status = vcsh run zsh git status
gc = vcsh run zsh git gcconfig.d
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mr/available.d contains all available repositories. Only
files/links present in mr/config.d, however, will be used by mr. That means
that in this example, only the zsh, gitconfigs, tmux and vim repositories will
be checked out. A simple mr update run in $HOME will clone or update those
four repositories listed in config.d.
~/.mrconfig
Finally, ~/.mrconfig will tie together all those single files which will allow
you to conveniently run mr up etc. to manage all repositories. It looks like
this:
[DEFAULT]
jobs = 5
# Use if your mr does not have vcsh support in mainline, yet
include = cat /usr/share/mr/vcsh
include = cat ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/mr/config.d/*repo.d
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/vcsh/repo.d is the directory where all git repositories which are under vcsh's control are located. Since their working trees are configured to be in $HOME, the files contained in those repositories will be put in $HOME directly. Of course, [mr] 1 will work with this layout if configured according to this document (see above).
vcsh will check if any file it would want to create exists. If it exists, vcsh
will throw a warning and exit. Move away your old config and try again.
Optionally, merge your local and your global configs afterwards and push with
vcsh run foo git push.
3.3 Moving into a New Host
To illustrate further, the following steps could move your desired configuration to a new host.
- Clone the mr repository (containing available.d, config.d etc.); for
example:
vcsh clone git://github.com/RichiH/vcsh_mr_template.git mr - Choose your repositories by linking them in config.d (or go with the default you may have already configured by adding symlinks to git).
- Make sure the line 'include = cat /usr/share/mr/vcsh' in .mrconfig points to an existing file
- Run mr to clone the repositories:
cd; mr update. - Done.
Hopefully the above could help explain how this approach saves time by
- making it easy to manage, clone and update a large number of repositories (thanks to mr) and
- making it unnecessary to create symbolic links in $HOME (thanks to vcsh).
If you want to give vcsh a try, follow the instructions below.