For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on creating a script to help me manage my dot files. I have a repo that contains all my dot files, but I wanted a script to easily update them whenver they got changed. I could have done this by just setting the working directory of a repo to ~ but I did NOT know that when I created my repo. Instead, I manually copied my important dot files into the repo in a different location. I decided to keep this format because it’s relatively simple, and it works for me. The issue was that I wanted a way to quickly copy all of the changed files into the repo.

At first, I created a simple shell script that copied the files and then added, committed, and pushed them to the repo. This expanded once I installed arch onto my desktop since now I had two separate hosts to keep track of. I added directories in the repo for each host and that seemed to solve the problem. With time, I realized that I wanted to expand on the script with stuff like making it easier to add new files/directories to track and all by adding an “installation” functionality. The shell script had started to get messy and long so I created a python version instead with the same functionality. After that, it’s just been me working on adding more functionality. As of today, it should be possible to install dot files from the repo with the script!

It’s been a fun journey working on creating this script and I hope to keep adding on the functionality and maybe making an AUR package one day. It’s probably not something that anyone would use but why not put it out there. By the way, you can check out the repo here! If anyone comes across this, let me know if you have any suggestions. :)

Edit on 2020-07-17: Update references to the new name of the project, DotBoy.