silo

Silo is a dotfile manager that supports templating.

Install

Currently silo can only be installed manually by cloning the repo and running cargo install --path .

Usage

Create Repo

First create a repo

silo --repo /path/to/repo init

This creates the repo directory and initializes a git repository. If no --repo argument is passed, it will default to $HOME/.local/share/silo or $HOME/AppData/Roaming/silo.

If you have an existing repo somewhere you can do

silo --repo /path/to/repo init <remote-url>

which will clone the remote repository to the given path.

Add configuration files

Now add some configuration files you want to track. Silo uses metadata-files to keep track of which files belong where. For example if you want all files in the root directory of your repo to be copied over to your home folder, you'd add a dir.toml entry like this:

path = "{{dirs.home}}"
ignored = []

Notice the use of templating for the path. The dirs variable contains paths specific to your platform. home in this case would either be {FOLDERID_Profile} on Windows or $HOME on Linux and MacOS. The ignored setting can be used to ignore certain files using an array of glob-strings.

Now add some files to a directory content in the repo. Normal files get just copied over. Subdirectories are created and copied as well, unless they themselves contain a dirs.toml file that specifies a different location.

Files ending with .tmpl are treated as handlebars templates and are processed before being written to the target location. The .tmpl extension will be stripped from the filename. You can check the available context variables and their values on the system with silo context.

Applying the configuration

Once you have a repo you want to apply you can run

silo --repo /path/to/repo apply

which will process and copy over all the configuration files of that repository.

Configuring Silo

Silo has several configuration files that are applied in the following order:

• ~/.config/silo.toml (or the equivalent on windows)
• repo.toml in the repo's folder
• repo.local.toml in the repo's folder (specific to the system. Don't commit this file)
• environment variables with prefix SILO_

A configuration file looks like this (with all the defaults):

# The diff tool that is being used when displaying changes and prompting for confirmation
diff_tool = "diff"

# Additional context that is available in all handlebar templates under the `ctx` variable
[template_context]
# hello = "world"

Advanced

File permissions

File permissions are persisted the way git stored them. This is true for templates as well. So a template with execute permission will result in a rendered file with the same permission.

Hooks

All .nu files in the hooks folder in the repos root are interpreted as hook scripts. Currently there's four functions that can be defined in these scripts that correspond to events of the same name:

before_apply_all 
after_apply_all
before_apply_each  
after_apply_each  

These functions will be called with a single argument, the event context, that can be used to change certain properties of files or inspect the entire list of files that are about to be written. For example one could change the attributes of script files with the following hook

# Make `test-2/main` executable
def after_apply_each [ctx] {
  if $ctx.dst =~ "test-2/main" {
    chmod +x $ctx.dst
  }
}

License

CNPL-v7+