YACM

Yet Another Configuration Manager

As i was frustrated manually managing configuration files located multiple places on my systems, i wanted to make a little script to make this easier. It evolved into to this slightly overblown solution.

As there exist other tools to do similar task i named this one YACM, as my naming skills are pretty bad.

YACM's model is to collect all configuration file backups in a single directory tree, and use a toml file to define relationships between backup and system used configurations. This fits nicely with the use of git to remotely store those configuration, and an example of such a setup is my dotfiles, where the only file i have manually touched is locations.toml.

Setup

Currently the only way to get yacm is by compiling it yourself. I have attempted to make this simple, but please leave issues if you run into trouble.

TL;DR;

Run:

git clone https://github.com/Blezzing/yacm.git
cd yacm
./install.sh

Compilation

Compilation requires a relatively new version of g++, as it uses the STL filesystem features.

I tested it with gcc 7.2.1 and had no issues.

From the repository directory, run:

make

PATH

Afterwards symlink/move/copy it to a folder included in your PATH variable, or add the yacm/bin folder to your PATH.

The makefile can copy the executable to the /usr/bin directory, run:

sudo make install

Configuration

To use the system a locations.toml is needed in some directory to declare it a backup directory. Additionally a config file can be saved as ~/config/yacm/config to declare what directory is the backup.

To make it less confusing you can use:

yacm setup

And it will guide you through setting up those files.

Uninstall

Aww, but run the included uninstall.sh script.

Usage

To use yacm, you need to have a folder you intend as the root for all your configuration file backups, such as ~/git/dotfiles. In this folder you have to have a file named locations.toml, which is going to list your files, and relations between the backup and real ones.

Model

The model of yacm is consisting of two types, elements and groups.

elements are representations of a single configuration file, they have a name, and two locations, representing where they should be on the system, and where they should be in the backup folder.

groups are representations of multiple elements you always want to consider together. It could be a group of files describing a colorscheme in different languages, or all the bash scripts you kept around for far too long.

Whenever you use yacm, you address files by their group.

locations.toml

This file is manually created and modified. It is in Tom's Obvious Minimal Language, and need to have the following structure:

[group-name]
element-name = ['path-on-system', 'path-in-backup']

With the names representing

Element	Description
group-name	The name of a group.
element-name	The name of an element in the previously mentioned group.
'path-on-system'	The path to where the configuration file should be in a working system.
'path-in-backup'	The path to where the configuration backup should be stored.

Example locations.toml

[herbstluftwm]
xinitrc = ['~/.xinitrc', 'herbstluftwm/.xinitrc']
autostart = ['~/.config/herbstluftwm/autostart', 'herbstluftwm/autostart']

[bash]
#etc

The example is chosen to show how this can help with storing different versions of .xinitrc, based on the window manager in use, to store more than a single setup in the same backup directory. It also shows the support for ~ which will be unwrapped to your HOME or USERPROFILE variable.

Notice

If you chose to use anything but ASCII in your location.toml, you might will have a bumpy ride. Same goes for spaces in names.

Commands

The syntax is pretty simple:

yacm [option] [group(s)]

Where option must be specified, as it descripes the wanted action, and any number of groups can be specified to perform the action on.

option can be:

Option	Description
list	Show the result of parsing the toml file. Can be used with groups to perform dummy searches.
save	Copies files from the system to the backup directory.
load	Copies files from the backup directory to the system.

Example Commands

Example 1

yacm save herbstluftwm

Will make a copy the two elements, xinitrc and autostart, from their system locations to their backup locations.

Example 2

yacm load

Will make a copy of every single element described the toml file, from their backup locations to their system locations.

Feature Wishlist

"He knows da wey!" -A wise red guy.

Future/Wanted Features:

• A way to handle individual configuration files at a time.
• A way to detect and resolve conflicts if multiple elements share a location in system or backup.
• A way to store information about where your backup location is, to avoid excessive use of cd

Won't Get

• Any kind of remote hosting. Use GitHub or something.

Thank You

Thank you to Skystrife for making the toml library cpptoml. It made this project much easier to start.