My $HOME is my castle

castle is a collection of bash scripts to manage dotfiles. It provides a convenient way to keep everything in sync using a git repo while at the same time allowing to have machine-specific configuration. It also allows you to quickly "move in" on a new machine by cloning the git repo and using its setup script.

Disclaimer: castle was not written by a bash scripting expert. The configuration presented here is from my own Mac and Linux boxes and may not necessarily be useful to you.

Features

• modularized bash configuration that allows to customize settings per host and per os
• vim configuration based on pathogen
• solarized color theme for bash, vim and dircolors
• a setup script to quickly "move in" on new machines

Installation

castle uses git submodules to manage vim plugins with pathogen. The recommended (as in: the only tested and supported) install location is to clone it into your $HOME directory. To install it, use

git clone --recursive https://github.com/asmod3us/castle $HOME/castle

to ensure that all submodule repos are pulled. After cloning into ~/castle there is a setup script in ~/castle/setup. Note that this script will attempt to process every link, file and directory under ~/castle/dotfiles and link them into your $HOME. It will unlink existing links that are in its way and create backup files following the naming convention filename-<timestamp>.dotfile.

bash configuration

castle has a special directory at ~/castle/dotfiles/shell which holds a modularized bash configuration. This configuration is bootstrapped with the setup script by linking ~/castle/bootstrap to your $HOME/.bashrc.

In the shell directory, put os or host specific configuration in files that follow a filename-<os> or filename-<hostname> naming convention. For instance, I keep my OS X specific environment variables in env-darwin.

vim configuration

castle also supports os-specific configuration files for vim in castle/dotfiles/vim/os. It matches the output of uname against hard-coded strings (currently: Darwin for Mac; otherwise Linux is assumed).

Adding dotfiles

To let castle manage a dotfile, just move it from ~/.dotfile into ~/castle/dotfile and run ~/castle/setup or create the symbolic link yourself.

Ignore generated documentation

From StackOverFlow Tip: this will ignore untracked content in submodules and thereby also generated documentation.

for s in `git submodule  --quiet foreach 'echo $name'` ; do git config submodule.$s.ignore untracked ; done

Update all submodules to latest

From StackOverflow discussion: update all submodules to latest version

git submodule foreach git pull origin master

or maybe a bit faster by running in parallel:

git submodule foreach "(git checkout master; git pull)&"

Credits

castle is inspired by dotfiles and a stackoverflow posting that I am unable to find in my browser history.