deja v0.1.12

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deja is a node.js-driven CLI utility for managing the git versioning of home directory sundries, such as dotfiles and personal scripts. deja was inspired by the Ruby application homesick.

The Basics

Putting your dotfiles and personal scripts into a Git repository offers a lot of advantages, but there's one obstacle: Git won't let you clone directly into your home directory. One can, however, clone a repo to another directory then use symbolic links to point from one's home directory to the cloned files. This is no fun to do manually, but deja automates the process.

If you have a Git repository containing your dotfiles, for example, you can clone this repo, automatically adding symlinks in your home directory to the items in it, using a deja command like:

deja clone git@github.com:mcantelon/dotfiles.git

The repo would then be stored at ~/.deja/dotfiles. If your repo contains submodules, deja will automatically initialize and update them.

Git repo URLs default to Github and the .git at the end of a repo URL can be left off, so you could also do a quick read-only clone by entering the following:

deja clone mcantelon/dotfiles

To update this repo you'd enter:

deja pull dotfiles

To spawn a new shell inside the repo (to do a git push, for example) you'd enter:

deja explore dotfiles

NOTE: you can use go instead of explore.

To remove this repo (and any home directory symlinks) you'd enter:

deja rm dotfiles

To see all repos you've cloned you'd enter:

deja ls

To see the contents of a repo you'd enter:

deja ls dotfiles

If using the ls command to view items in a repo, additional information about each entry may be shown. If an entry is a directory, "dir" will be added. If there isn't a home directory entry linking the repo entry, "unlinked" will be added. If there is a home directory entry with the same name as a repo entry, "conflicts" will be added.

Linking and Diffing

To remove links to your repo, for whatever reason, you'd enter:

deja unlink dotfiles

To re-add links to your repo after removing them, you'd enter:

deja link dotfiles

To see the differences between a repo and what currently exists in your home directory you'd enter something like this:

deja diff dotfiles

Subdirectories

When deja clones, it just adds symlinks to the first level of files and directories contained in your repo, skipping symlink creation when a file or directory of the same name already exists in the home directory.

If your repo contains a bin directory, but you already have a bin directory in your home directory, deja would skip creation of a symlink to bin.

If, however, you wanted to create symlinks in your home directory's bin directory to the contents of your repo's bin directory you could do so by entering:

deja link dotfiles/bin

If you did this and changed your mind you could remove the symlinks by entering:

deja unlink dotfiles/bin

Editing Files

You can edit a file in a Deja repository by entering something like:

deja edit dotfiles/.bashrc

This will open your file using whatever editor is specified by the environmental variable EDITOR. If this isn't defined, vim will be used.

Cheatsheets

You can edit cheatsheets, after letting Deja know where you want them stored (see the following Configuration section), by entering something like:

deja cheat git

This will open a file called "git.txt" in your cheats directory.

A sensible thing to do is aliasing cheat to deja cheat to save keystrokes.

Configuration

If you're ultra-lazy, you can set your GitHub username in $HOME/.gitconfig. You'll then be able to do quick writable clones like this:

deja clone dotfiles

Set your GitHub username is $HOME/.gitconfig using the following command:

git config --global github.user YOUR_USERNAME

If you have files or file types that you'd like deja to not link to your home directory (such as README files and such), you can specify then in a .dejaignore file in your individual repos (or globally if you create a $HOME/.dejaignore ignore list). The ignore list uses the same scheme as a .gitignore file.

Note that .git, .gitmodules, and .dejaignore are always ignored during linking and don't need to be added to an ignore file.

If you're using Deja's cheat command, you can configure your cheats directory using a command like the following:

git config --global deja.cheatpath dotfiles/cheats

Installation

The easiest way is via npm:

npm install deja

Dependencies

deja requires the rimraf, optimist, and mingy node.js modules (available via npm as "rimraf", "optimist", and "mingy" respectively).

deja also requires git to be installed.

Testing

Testing requires the Mocha and should.js modules (available via rpm as "mocha" and "should" respectively).

Run the tests by entering:

mocha -t 0

The large timeout value required is due to calls, during testing, to GitHub.