Hermit

Hermit is changing!

We feel that we've reached the limits of what seems reasonable to accomplish in shell. So we're switching to Rust!

Stay tuned, exciting things will be happening soon.

Bring your home with you

Hermit is a home directory configuration management tool that facilitates moving between different computers without losing your shell (configurations).

Hermit was originally inspired by Briefcase which solves the same problem. However, Briefcase is written in Ruby. We wanted something more trivially portable. Since your shell configuration is so basic, it seemed like having minimal dependencies would be a good thing. Currently Hermit is dependent on the bash shell, but we hope to make it depend solely on POSIX shell capabilities to maximize portability.

The code infrastructure is heavily borrowed from the awesome shell tools rbenv, and nvm.

Hermit is currently alpha software. I use it and we have a reasonable number of tests, but there may (will!) be bugs.

The Problem

Hermit aims to alleviate three separate but related problems related to keeping your dotfiles under source control.

1. Not having the source control directory in your home root
2. Facilitating sym-link management because of #1
3. Having secret information in your dotfiles that is NOT committed to git

_{This section was inspired by David Nolen's talk given to The Recurse Center about "Solution Oriented Language."}

Philosophy

Hermit is dependent on Git for much of it's functionality. In fact, if you don't know how to use Git, Hermit won't be very useful for you. This is because Hermit as a tool fundamentally collaborates with Git.

Hermit commands are mostly wrappers around the corresponding Git commands. But Hermit always adds some extra behavior on top of what Git normally does. As a convenience, Hermit also provides a way to run arbitrary Git commands against your dotfiles repository without cding to that directory.

Hermit aims to be an assistant; it's not trying to run the show. As a consequence, Hermit will never actually commit anything to your profile repository. Instead - like the perfect office assistant - Hermit will prepare everything for you, and then let you decide whether or not to commit it. This gives you the option of reviewing exactly the changes that Hermit is proposing to make to your profile and helps you avoid accidentally committing any secrets.

Install

Use Git

You're going to need git to make use of hermit, so just make sure you have git installed and then clone the repo.

git clone git@github.com:RadicalZephyr/hermit.git ~/.hermit

Now, you need to have ~/.hermit/bin on your path, so add something like this to your shell init file:

export PATH="$PATH":~/.hermit/bin

Usage

Still working on this... Check out the tutorial, or peruse the docs folder or run hermit help.

Usage: hermit <command> [<args>]

Some useful hermit commands are:
   commands    List all available hermit commands
   init        Start a new hermit profile
   clone       Create a local hermit from an existing remote hermit
   status      Display the status of your hermit
   use         Switch to using a different profile
   add         Add files to your hermit directory
   update      Update redacted files already stored in git

See `hermit help <command>' for information on a specific command.

Running the Tests

Hermit now has a test suite! You can run it with ./runtests.sh.

Where We're Headed

Checkout our Waffle.io board for a more organized view of what's going on in the project.

Contributing

First, please take a look at our CONTRIBUTING.md. Next, probably check out our Waffle.io board, and look at the size 1 issues in the To-Do column. From there, the standard "fork, branch, code, pull request" workflow works well.

As a bonus, if you use the waffle.io branch naming scheme for the issue you're working on, it will automatically update our Waffle board.

License

Copyright 2014, Geoff Shannon

This file is part of Hermit.

Hermit is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Hermit is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Hermit. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.