Beginner Tutorial

This tutorial will walk you through setting up a git repository for your dotfiles and creating a HOMELY.py script to automate their installation on any of your computers.

1. Create an Online Repository

Since homely relies on a Version Control System to keep your dotfiles syncronised across computers, the first step is to create a repository for your dotfiles. If you already have a repository containing your dotfiles hosted online, proceed to 2. Add a Repository.

If you are happy to publish your dotfiles publicly, you are may wish to host wish to use one of the following VCS hosting providers:

GitHub
Create a Repository. Requires signing up for a free account.
BitBucket
Create a Repository. Requires signing up for a free account.

2. Add a Repository

Once you have created your online repository, you will need to tell homely to create a local clone of it. Use homely add <url>, where <url> is the same URL you would use to git clone the repository yourself.

Note: It is easier to get started cloning via HTTPS, but setting up SSH key access can reduce the number of password prompts encountered.

GitHub (assuming a username of john.smith and a repository named dotfiles):

# HTTPS
$ homely add https://github.com/john.smith/dotfiles.git

# SSH
$ homely add git@github.com:phodge/dotfiles.git

BitBucket (assuming a username of john.smith and a repository named dotfiles):

# HTTPS
$ homely add https://john.smith@bitbucket.org/john.smith/dotfiles.git

# SSH
$ homely add git@bitbucket.org:john.smith/dotfiles.git

homely will create a local clone of your repository and put it in your home directory. If you wish you may tell homely add where to create the local clone by giving it a path as a 2nd parameter. If you don’t provide an explicit path, the repo’s local path will be similar to what git clone would use. (For the purposes of this tutorial, we will assume your dotfiles repo was cloned to ~/dotfiles.). Check the CLI Reference for homely add for more information.

3. Write and Run a HOMELY.py script

homely will look for a python script named HOMELY.py in your dotfiles repo and execute it (import it) to install your config files locally. The simplest things you can do in your HOMELY.py script is creating directories and symlinks to things stored in the dotfiles repo.

For example, if you wanted to make sure that the ~/.config/nvim and ~/.config/pip directories are always created on all of your machines, you could create a HOMELY.py script that looks like this:

# ~/dotfiles/HOMELY.py
# NOTE that we use homely's mkdir() not os.mkdir()
from homely.files import mkdir
# create ~/.config first - mkdir() is not recursive
mkdir('~/.coonfig')
mkdir('~/.coonfig/nvim')
mkdir('~/.coonfig/pip')

Now you can use homely update to execute your HOMELY.py:

$ homely update

Now, assuming you already have a pip.conf and an init.vim in your ~/.config directory, you might want to move these files into your dotfiles repo and create symlinks to them on each machine.

First, move the real files into your dotfiles repo:

$ mv ~/.config/nvim/init.vim ~/dotfiles/
$ mv ~/.config/pip/pip.conf ~/dotfiles/

Now you can modify your HOMELY.py script to also install symlinks to those files:

# ~/dotfiles/HOMELY.py

# NOTE that we use homely's mkdir() not os.mkdir()
from homely.files import mkdir
# create ~/.config first - mkdir() is not recursive
mkdir('~/.coonfig')
mkdir('~/.coonfig/nvim')
mkdir('~/.coonfig/pip')

# NOTE that we use homely's symlink() not os.symlink()
from homely.files import symlink
symlink('init.vim', '~/.coonfig/nvim')
symlink('pip.conf', '~/.coonfig/pip')

homely’s functions are idempotent, so it is safe to run them again and again. Run homely update again now to install your symlinks:

$ homely update

Oh no! We misspelled ~/.config everywhere! This is actually OK, because homely’s Automatic Cleanup can remove all these unwanted ~/.coonfig directories and symlinks for you, and all you need to do is correct the typo and run homely update again. We can tidy up the code while we’re at it:

# ~/dotfiles/HOMELY.py
from homely.files import mkdir, symlink

mkdir('~/.config')
mkdir('~/.config/nvim')
mkdir('~/.config/pip')

symlink('init.vim', '~/.config/nvim/')
symlink('pip.conf', '~/.config/pip/')

Now re-run update:

$ homely update

So what exactly did homely update do here?

  • First, homely update re-ran the corrected HOMELY.py script which created the symlinks in ~/.config instead of ~/.coonfig.
  • After finishing with the HOMELY.py script, homely update noticed that the calls to mkdir('~/.coonfig...') and symlink(..., '~/.coonfig...') weren’t executed, so it performed Automatic Cleanup of each of the things under ~/.coonfig that it had created previously.

Automatic cleanup is one of the best features of homely. Generally speaking it means you can just delete something from your HOMELY.py script and homely update will make sure it gets removed anywhere it has already been installed. There are some edge cases and limitations so there is a dedicated page for how automatic cleanup works which you may wish to read after finishing the tutorials.

4. Installing Packages

If you were writing a plain shell script to install your dotfiles, you might also include a few calls to e.g. brew install to install your favourite software packages. homely includes a dedicated function for this which offers the following advantages:

  • Automaticaly chooses between brew, yum, pacman or apt depending which on what’s available on your operating system.
  • Won’t hang on a sudo password prompt when there’s no TTY available.
  • Automatic Cleanup!

You could get your HOMELY.py script to install ack and ag like this:

#~/dotfiles/HOMELY.py
[...snip...]

from homely.install import installpkg
# use the name "ack-grep" when installing using apt
installpkg('ack', apt='ack-grep')
# ag uses different names for yum, pacman and apt-get
installpkg('ag', yum='the_silver_searcher', apt='silversearcher-ag', pacman = 'the_silver_searcher')

and then:

$ homely update

Check the reference for homely.install.installpkg() for more information.