pyhome

As someone who uses the terminal through most of the working day and for the majority of tasks, I like to use a customised shell environment and editor program. However, switching between machines - be they my office workstation, laptop, web servers I maintain or compute clusters I use for running simulations - inevitably ends up with the hassle of juggling a variety of configuration files between systems and updating them all with each change to my setup.

Sounds like a job for version control.

The Task at Hand

Dotfiles are simple text files in your home directory that store commands or settings for the shell and other programs, so called because their names begin with a ., rendering them hidden by default in the shell and in other programs. In my case, I have a set of configuration files for the bash and zsh shells, the latter of which I use mainly, and a set of config files and packages for vim, my primary text editor.

Storing these in a repository then poses a wee bit of a problem. As these files are often located directly in your home directory, they cannot so readily be stored in a typical version control repository. Fortunately, the excellent tool homesick by Josh Nichols provides an easy and convenient way to maintain your dotfiles in a reposiory and then automatically generate symbolic links to them from the appropriate location in your home directory.

Unfortunately, none of the systems I use come with Ruby, the language homesick is based on, preinstalled, and installing Ruby on compute clusters with archaic packages, even with the excellent RVM tool, quickly became as much of a hassle as the tool was meant to avoid.

pyhome

As a self-diagnosed Python junkie, I waited until a spare minute and wrote my own homesick equivalent, pyhome. Following the same repository structure as homesick, pyhome replicates its basic functions:

• pyhome clone - clone a new dotfile git repository to the right location
• pyhome pull - update a dotfile git repository and its submodules
• pyhome list - list existing repositories in the pyhome folder
• pyhome link - generate symbolic links in the home folder for a repo
• pyhome unlink - remove symbolic links for a repo
• pyhome remove - remove a repo and its links

Conflicts between existing dotfiles and links in the home folder are reported, and the user is prompted to choose an action, preventing accidentally wiping existing configurations.

pyhome is written to ensure backwards compatability with reasonably modern versions of both Python 2 and 3, and without dependencies outside the standard library, making sure that it runs smoothly out of the box with the preinstalled system Python on any of the systems that I use.

Installation

pyhome is available on the Python Package Index (PyPI), and so can be easily installed with pip, the Python package manager:

pip install pyhome

You can also get the latest version of pyhome from its GitHub page. Comments, suggestions and contributions are welcome!