dartgun

the stupid dotfile manager.

Impetus

Managing dot files are annoying. They're some of the most essential parts of a developer's system, yet most operating systems (distros) don't provide a way to easily manage them. There's the ~/.config directory, which in theory holds all of your configuration files. If this were true, you could simply git init inside ~/.config and have a versioned dotfile repo that you could backup and deploy to new machines. However, configuration files often end up all over a system. There's NixOS, but not everyone can dedicate 40 hours a week to configuring their OS.

Advanced dotfile helper solutions do exist, but what most users need doesn't really amount to more than a set of bash scripts to copy their dotfiles around their system. A more "robust" tool which offers many features for managing your configuration files also ends up requiring the user to look through a massive manpage. Whatever happened to doing one thing, and doing it well?

Dartgun's design statement is to be as simple as possible while providing just enough features for most non power users. Anyone who reads through the example configuration files should be able to utilize all of dartgun's features immediately. It does not offer any advanced features or configuration options, and is managed by a single toml file.

Dartgun essentially takes a central repository of configuration files and places them into the correct places on your system by symlinking (or hardlinking). Everything lives in one folder which can be versioned by git. The primary goal is to provide an easy way to manage your dotfiles in a centralized area and sync them between different systems. Dartgun allows you to specify which configuration files are used on which systems by identifying each system with a string. Instead of using your machine's hostname, the system names are user-defined, which gives great configuration flexibility, for free. For example, you get specific by giving each system a unique name, or extremely general and simply have mac and linux as system identifiers.

A secondary goal is to assist in setting up a new system by helping place configuration files in the correct places. This is useful for chronic distro-hoppers or anyone re-installing their OS. However, automatically installing additional software and dependencies is outside of the scope of the project. Attempting to automatically set up a system via shell scripting (or similar methods) is almost always unwieldy and relies on behavior which is non-deterministic and may break at any time. NixOS is the best option for this, and actually works, but again, requires the user to first dedicate a significant amount of time to learning the syntax and idiosyncrasies of NixOS and the Nix language.

Dartgun is for people who ain't got that kind of time.

Non-goals

Dartgun is specifically designed to have a minimum amount of features to make it as easy to adopt as possible. If you're reading this, I'll assume that you are already looking for a dotfile manager. Therefore, it might be easier to list things that Dartgun is not designed to do. If you do not need any of these features, then Dartgun might the right dotfile manager for you.

Dartgun is not for:

• Managing a fleet of computers
• Automatically deploying servers
• Deterministically setting up an entire OS from configuration files (see NixOS for that)
• Automatically installing packages or software alongside dotfiles; it only manages the files, the user is still responsible for ensuring software is available
• Power users who want deep customizability and feature sets to help fully automate system configuration

Goals

• Easily version dotfiles with git by keeping everything in one central directory
• Copy dotfiles to a new machine quickly and transparently
• Sync dotfiles between different machines
• Keep configuration effort to a minimum

How it works

Dartgun allows you to centralize all of your dotfiles in a single directory.

Dartgun is configured through the dartgun.toml file. You should set your machine name in this file like so:

machine = "youwens-mac"

Also, it's common to have programs that are not installed on every computer. Therefore, each dotfile will specify which application it is for, and whether or not it should be applied by default. See the dotfile configuration below for how to configure this.

You can specify which applications are in which machines with the apps.toml file.

[youwens-mac]
available = ["neovim", "hyprland", "zsh"]

Why symlinking?

Any configuration updates made will always sync back to the dartgun directory so they can be tracked by git. Likewise, any remote updates pulled in will also be automatically reflected in the system for free.

Why no Windows support?

Windows symlinks work a little differently from Unix symlinks. The difference is not massive and I plan to look into supporting Windows at a later date.

Usage guide

Begin by creating a folder to place your dotfiles in. I'll refer to it as the "dartgun folder" for the rest of these instructions. Mine is located at ~/.dartgun, but it can be called whatever you want and located wherever you want it.

Place your dotfiles in the dartgun folder. You can organize them however you want. The primary configuration is done in the dartgun.json file, located in root of the dartgun folder. In here, you specify where each file or folder in the directory goes.

For example, I can tell the .dartgun/nvim folder to go to ~/.config/nvim with

{
  darts = [
    {
      location: "./nvim",
      destination: "~/.config/nvim",
      strategy: "hardlink",
      machines: [youwens-mac, youwens-archlinux],
      for: "neovim"
    }
  ]
}

location: the relative path, from the dartgun folder, where either the directory or file to be copied is located
destination: the destination path to which the file should be copied to. must be an absolute path
strategy: which strategy to use to copy the file. accepts 'hardlink', 'symlink', or 'copy'
machines: which machine names this file will be copied on
for: the application which the dotfile is for

Note that you can choose how you want to approach the machine configuration. You can either have a specific machine key for each computer you own, or specify machines by platform (eg. "arch", "mac", "fedora"). You can get as fine-grained or generic as you'd like.

Then, run dartgun blast to apply your dotfiles to the locations. For nested destination directories, it will create all of the directories in the chain if they do not exist already. You may have to run sudo dartgun blast if you are trying to copy files to restricted locations.

For symlinked and hardlinked directories, you can simply sync your dotfiles by updating them in the dartgun folder, for example by running git pull after you've set up git versioning.

If you use the copy strategy, then you need to re-run dartgun blast each time you update the files in your dartgun folder. generally, we do not recommend the copy method unless you have to for some reason, since it may lead to desyncs between the dartgun folder and your actual system, while this is impossible with hardlinking or symlinking.

License

This project is licensed under GPLv3.