sync files all over the place

ssync (system sync) is a symlinking git wrapper for [config] files.

🚧 Still under development but apparently stable. Keep backups though, just in case.

Synopsis

It acts as a wrapper to put any file into its repository and puts a symlink in the original place. This allows to apply version control without having to store stuff in one place or litter your drive with separate repositories.

The idea is to synchronize multiple machines this way by synchronizing everything that is not created by packages but was placed or configured manually. If you only care about files in /etc you might want to have a look at etckeeper, if manually gitting ~/.config is enough, fine... but if you like to unify all of this and would like to have full control over a selective set of files ssync might be just the right tool for you.

Requirements

• Dependencies
  • git version 2.X
  • rsync (tested with version 3)
  • GNU's coreutils, bash version 4
• Permissions
  • needs to run as root to properly deal with file permissions

Setup & Usage

As root user these are the first steps to get started:

# ssync

ssync will tell you to edit the config template created at /etc/ssync.conf. Afterwards execute the setup:

# ssync setup new

On subsequent installations you would call ssync setup but for now the new parameter is required to create a new ssync-compatible repository and push it upstream. Look at the initial commit:

# ssync log

For the moment the repo is clean:

# ssync status

Add some files or folders to keep in sync:

# ssync add /etc/bash.bashrc
# ssync add foo_file
# ssync add /root/bar_directory

This moves the specified paths to the repository and puts symlinks in their original places. Now ssync status will show these recent changes. To remove repository contents and restore them try:

# ssync rm /root/bar_directory

To synchronize your files to other machines package the changes with

# ssync commit "added some files"

and publish them:

# ssync publish

After installing ssync on another machine you can would use

# ssync update

to fetch the latest changes.

For a full command overview use: ssync help