Never Leave Your Dotfiles Behind Again With Homesick

I was on a server the other day, and was getting a little weepy. I missed my dotfiles. The thought of doing this manually, especially on multiple servers, was even worse than the homesickness I had. Basically, I wanted:

A convention for laying out dotfiles repos
A command to clone my dotfiles from git
A command to symlink the files into my home directory
A delicious scotch

Lots of folks, myself included, have started sharing their configuration files, ie .vimrc, .bashrc, and .screenrc, on GitHub and elsewhere. Sometimes though, I think they are really more for personal backup and maybe to just share tips and tricks, rather than share them for consumption by others.

Why would I say such a thing? Well, let’s say you found someone that has put together the ultimate set vim configuration. How would you go about using them?

git clone whatever
Peek into the repo, try to figure out how it’s laid out and where the config files are
Are the files at the top level of the repo?
Do they include the dot in the file name, ie .vimrc, or exclude it so it’s easier to see when doing ls, ie vimrc?
Symlink the files into your home directory

After deliberating and coding for an evening, I had something to show for my troubles: homesick. Basically, it provides what I just described, less the scotch.

$ gem install homesick
$ homesick clone git://github.com/technicalpickles/pickled-vim.git
   git clone  git://github.com/technicalpickles/pickled-vim.git to /Users/technicalpickles/.homesick/repos/pickled-vim
$ homesick list
 pickled-vim  git://github.com/technicalpickles/pickled-vim.git
$ homesick symlink pickled-vim
     symlink  /Users/technicalpickles/.homesick/repos/pickled-vim/home/.gvimrc to /Users/technicalpickles/.gvimrc
     symlink  /Users/technicalpickles/.homesick/repos/pickled-vim/home/.vim to /Users/technicalpickles/.vim
     symlink  /Users/technicalpickles/.homesick/repos/pickled-vim/home/.vimrc to /Users/technicalpickles/.vimrc

homesick assumes a few things about the repos it clones and how to symlink files from them:

It’s a git repo (duh)
It contains a home directory
home contain any number of dotfiles, including the . prefix
Any file in home will be symlinked into the current user’s home directory

homesick uses thor under the hood, which provides a number of advantages:

Pretty, pretty colors
Simple parsing of commandline arguments
Helper methods for creating files, directories, etc
Builtin support for running the command without output, or only pretending to run the commands, or forcing the commands no matter what the cost
Ease to add new ‘commands’, ie symlink, clone
Conflict resolution when files already exist

Overall, I’m pretty happy where homesick is right now. It does what I wanted it to do, and looks pretty while doing so, so I can’t really complain.