Dotpkg

A package manager for your dotfiles.

Usage

First make sure to have Python 3.9+ installed. To create a dotfile package, set up a folder with the following layout (the top-level folder is assumed to be some folder, e.g. a Git repo, where you store all of your dotfiles):

dotfiles
└─my-package
  ├─dotpkg.json
  ├─.some-dotfile-one
  ├─.some-dotfile-two
    ...

A minimal dotpkg.json is structured as follows:

{
  "name": "my-package",
  "description": "Description of my package"
}

Navigating into dotfiles and running dotpkg install my-package will then symlink .some-dotfile-one and .some-dotfile-two into your home directory.

Optionally, you can specify keys such as requiresOnPath too, which will only install the package if a given binary is found on your PATH (useful if your config targets some application). Additionally, targetDir configures the search path to symlink the files into some other directory than your home (dotpkg will use the first directory that exists, this is useful to cross-platform packages).

For example, a package that manages configurations for Visual Studio Code could look like this:

{
  "name": "vscode",
  "description": "Visual Studio Code settings and keybindings",
  "requiresOnPath": ["code"],
  "targetDir": [
    "${home}/.config/Code",
    "${home}/Library/Application Support/Code"
  ]
}