dotgen

what is dotgen?

dotgen is a templating system for dotfiles (or any other text files) written in php. It reads variables from a config file and renders templates using them as a context.

For now, dotgen can read configuration from .ini files and process templates written for twig.

why?

Maintaining dotfiles for different machines in different branches of a repository seemed tedious to me as I would either have to cherry-pick back and forth between several orphan branches or I would have to keep rebasing onto a common ancestor.

What I really wanted was multiple, similar possible instances of the same text file, depending on a few variables. It turns out that in web development, we do this all the time when rendering web pages. As such, it seemed like a good idea to go ahead and use a templating engine in combination with an easy to read and edit configuration file format and put it all together.

how?

install php

• run $ php -v

• your php version should at least be 7.0.0

• if necessary, install or upgrade

  • Arch Linux: # pacman -Syy php
  • Debian: # apt-get update && apt-get install php7.0
  • Mac OS: $ brew install php70

create templates

For now, check out the twig documentation for template designers

create a config file

Example configurations along with a simple template can be found in the examples folder.

Each configuration consists of multiple collections. A collection is a set of variable definitions along with names (paths) of templates that should be rendered using the same, shared set of variables. The names of the templates are defined in an array inside the collection named __templates.

A configuration can also include a collection with the special name global. Variable definitions from this collection can be accessed from every collection defined within the same configuration. You can also choose to overwrite the global variable definition inside the scope of a collection by simply redefining the variable inside of it.

download and run dotgen

Pre-compiled phar packages are available here.

Download one, then

$ php dotgen.phar render path/to/config.ini

For a list of available command line options, run

$ php dotgen.phar help

or try

$ php dotgen.phar help render

Command line interface is subject to change :)

roll your own

To get started developing, clone the repo, get composer if you haven't already, composer install the dependencies and you're good to go.

$ git clone [email protected]:cedrichaase/dotgen.git

$ cd dotgen

$ composer install

$ bin/dotgen render path/to/config/file

You can also create a single-file executable phar package using clue/phar-composer:

$ cd dotgen

$ wget https://github.com/clue/phar-composer/releases/download/v1.0.0/phar-composer.phar

$ php phar-composer.phar build