I discovered freehg.org today, which is a free mercurial repo hosting site. In spirit it’s very akin to github, but obviously lacks many of the features and much of the polish. However, this particular purpose, it’s more than sufficient.
If you access many *nix machines on a regular basis, you’ve probably have been annoyed that your custom configuration files are not immediately available. I used to scp config files around all the time, but that gold old quick. I’m going to show you my current setup for making sure that all the dotfiles (zshrc, vimrc, etc) that I use are version controlled and are easily accessible.
First, collect all your dotfiles in one directory and make it an hg repository. I use ~/.dotfiles, you can use whatever you like. Here is what my .dotfiles looks like:
iapetus:~/.dotfiles> ls -l total 54k -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 85 2008-07-04 10:20 ackrc -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 50 2008-05-29 18:24 bash_profile -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 2.0k 2008-05-29 18:24 bashrc -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 569 2008-07-04 14:09 create_symlinks.py drwx------ 3 yqiang staff 102 2008-06-13 15:52 gtk-2.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 624 2008-07-04 09:48 gvimrc -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 48 2008-06-17 15:46 hgignore -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 454 2008-07-04 10:30 hgrc drwx------ 5 yqiang staff 170 2008-06-29 17:55 irssi -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 403 2008-06-22 11:20 pdbrc -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 642 2008-06-29 10:49 screenrc -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 6.8k 2008-07-04 13:39 vimrc -rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 5.8k 2008-06-29 17:43 zshrc
Then create a freehg.org account and initialize a public repo there. You can find mine at:
http://freehg.org/u/yqiang/dotfiles/
Now, when you access a new machine, to get all your dotfiles in order, just do:
veritas:~ > hg clone http://freehg.org/u/yqiang/dotfiles/ .dotfiles requesting all changes adding changesets adding manifests adding file changes added 22 changesets with 37 changes to 15 files 15 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved veritas:~ > cd .dotfiles veritas:~/.dotfiles > python create_symlinks.py Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/zshrc to /home/yqiang/.zshrc Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/gvimrc to /home/yqiang/.gvimrc Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/bash_profile to /home/yqiang/.bash_profile Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/hgignore to /home/yqiang/.hgignore Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/bashrc to /home/yqiang/.bashrc Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/hgrc to /home/yqiang/.hgrc Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/pdbrc to /home/yqiang/.pdbrc Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/ackrc to /home/yqiang/.ackrc Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/screenrc to /home/yqiang/.screenrc Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/vimrc to /home/yqiang/.vimrc
create_symlink.py is a simple python script that will create the symlinks for you. Here is the code for it:
#!/usr/bin/env python import os home = os.path.abspath(os.environ['HOME']) path = os.path.join(home, '.dotfiles') excludes = ['gtk-2.0', 'create_symlinks.py'] for f in os.listdir(path): if f.startswith('.'): continue if f not in excludes: dst = os.path.join(home, '.' + f) src = os.path.abspath(f) try: print "Symlinking %s to %s" % (src, dst) os.symlink(src, dst) except Exception, msg: print "Failed to symlink %s to %s " % (src, dst) print msg
Tada. All your config files are in place now. If you’re really into it, you can run a cron script that automatically does an hg pull so you don’t even have to think about it.
Recent Comments