dotty

A tool for declaratively managing your command line tools and configuration

The Problem

I had a few computers that I do development work on, and it was a annoying to keep them in sync. I wanted a way to script installing and configuring my tools, but lacked tooling in pure shell scripting with the level of polish I desired. I knew I could build the tool I wanted using Node.js, so... here's dotty!

Installation

On a system that already has Node installed, you can grab dotty as an NPM package from @alexlafroscia/dotty. If you're setting it up on a new machine, a pkg-built binary can be found on the Releases tab.

Usage

Defining tasks

A dotty task looks something like this:

// tasks/brew.js
module.exports = function(Task) {
  return class Homebrew extends Task {
    constructor() {
      super();

      // Set the name of the program being installed
      this.programName = 'brew';
    }

    /**
     * Check if the program needs to be installed
     */
    checkInstallation() {
      return this.which('brew');
    }

    /**
     * Install the program
     */
    install() {
      return this.exec(
        '/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"'
      );
    }
  };
};

Check out the example-tasks directory for more examples that show off the full set of hooks available. The Task source code has additional information on the available hooks and how they interact with each other.

Running tasks

You can invoke dotty like so:

dotty path/to/tasks/directory

I recommend keeping your tasks in a location where they can easily be synchronized between all of your machines, such as a dotfiles repo, iCloud or Dropbox. For example, on my machine, synchronizing a new machine looks like:

dotty $DOTFILES/tasks

since $DOTFILES is aliased to my dotfiles directory.