Overhauled dotfiles

[JasonYao]

I'll stick the new code in a new repo and mark this one as deprecated when I'm done.

Requirements

Basically, this is to list out what I'm trying to do for my new set of dotfiles

• Automatically sets everything up
• Has some mechanism to update certain modules independently, or all at once
• Should be written in python 3, preferably 3.6+ so I can use f-strings everywhere
• Should be config-file based, that way it makes it easy for people to fork and change
• This python library should expose some scripts to make it easy to update/upgrade the dotfiles from anywhere in the directory tree

Possible Approaches

With that in mind, one way to do it would be as a python package that I'd publish to pypi. It'd have the extra benefit of teaching me everything i need to publish my own python libraries in general, and have it be widely available whenever I need it.

The question really is what to do about applications and libraries that need to be installed. Possible way to break it down:

• all (dotfiles install all)
• applications (dotfiles install applications)
• CLI libraries (dotfiles install libraries)
• Development environment (dotfiles install env)
• Symlinking configuration files and setting sane defaults (dotfiles install configs)

Commands to contain:

• dotfiles install <- installs a module
• dotfiles upgrade <- updates a module based on the config file in ~/.dotfiles/config.ini
• dotfiles uninstall <- uninstalls a given module

General Flow

• Initial init bash script. This should install the bare basics that only need to be installed once (x-code tools, brew, etc.). After setting up foundational stuff, it should install the modern-dotfiles (or whatever the python package is called) into the laptop-3.6.3 pyenv environment, and then call dotfiles install --all
• the dotfiles install will then install each of the module sections

[JasonYao]

Notes

• Currently for brew stuff, we run a brew list command a lot, which is a really slow operation. Instead, we should cache this value from the first time we run it, and then check for existence within that cached value
• Using python for control flow initial framework makes sense, and we can do a gradual rollout:
  • v1: Python-based control flow that will call out to specific bash commands when needed
  • v2: Replacing the bash commands with native code when possible
  • v3: Adding in a config-file based approach, enabling somebody to do the following:
  • dotfiles install <some link to a config file somewhere>
• For config files, we need to decide on a standard.
  • It should be noted that the most "pythonic" way to do configuration would have been an ini file that gets read-in by configparser.
  • Unfortunately, configparser's an ancient piece of code without support for nested data structures. Since there's definitely a need for these nested data config structures in the future, that means we're stuck with using either a JSON or YAML reader.
  • Of those, YAML has the advantage of having comments, while JSON is universal and has automatic type conversion.
  • For now, let's create a Configuration object in python that can .load(), from which it will load in a json file. Adding in support for YAML can then be a thing afterwards, and the Configuration object will be a nice interface for accessing configuration values.

[JasonYao]

Structure

The new dotfiles repo's structure should be something like:

.
├── CHECKLIST.md
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── start-opinionated <- Bootstrap script that will install pyenv and good environments, then call the start script
├── start <- Bootstrap script that will install via a pre-installed python 3 environment
├── pydotfiles <- Package for the pydotfiles library
│   └── Actual code for pydotfiles that installs the dotfiles
└── git <- contains a directory of git scripts
    └── pre-push <- script to run before every push

[JasonYao]

Flows

Install

Completely new computer

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JasonYao/pydotfiles/master/start-opinionated | bash -s {CONFIGURATION_REPO_GIT_LINK}
# e.g.
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JasonYao/pydotfiles/master/start-opinionated | bash -s git@github.com:JasonYao/dotfiles.git

Established computer with a working python 3.6+ environment

pip install pydotfiles
pydotfiles install {CONFIGURATION_REPO_GIT_LINK}

# e.g.
pydotfiles install git@github.com:JasonYao/dotfiles.git  # Git repo containing a config.json or config.yaml

Upgrade

# Updates all dependencies via the host package manager
pydotfiles update

Clean

# Cleans out the dotfiles cache and the package manager cache
pydotfiles clean

Uninstall

# Uninstalls all modules
pydotfiles uninstall all

# Uninstalls specific modules
pydotfiles uninstall git  # Uninstalls git settings
pydotfiles uninstall ssh  # Uninstalls SSH settings
pydotfiles uninstall defaults  # Uninstalls host settings to factory defaults
pydotfiles uninstall dependencies  # Uninstalls dependencies via host package manager
pydotfiles uninstall env  # Uninstalls environment managers like rbenv, jenv, pyenv
pydotfiles uninstall terminal  # [MacOS only] Uninstalls the terminal and its settings