Most of us developer types have at least two machines we use routinely, and managing that can be a chore. Specifically, I usually want to do the following every time I sit down at a machine to hack on something:
- Keep config files like .bash_profile and .gitconfig synchronized. (This requires scripting since Dropbox ignores hidden files.)
- Patch all OS-level libraries using the native package management system on OSX, Ubuntu and CentOS.
- Update my database daemons and other system services.
- Upgrade development libraries.
- Merge in ‘git pull origin master’ project source code for all my clones.
Doing all this every time I hop to a different machines was chore, so I wrote a few BASH scripts to help. More importantly, I recently packaged them into a public GitHub and released it! Homeboy is a set of small, plain BASH scripts. After following the simply installation instructions, you just run homeboy every morning:
$ homeboy
This will run the updates you specify, though I’ve only included the stuff I use regularly: namely brew (OSX), rvm (OSX and Linux), apt (Ubuntu), yum (Red Hat/CentOS) etc. I ask that you submit pull requests to add support for updating Perl, Python, MacPorts etc. The synchronization mechanism works by zipping the specified list of files into a .zip in a synchronized directory managed by Dropbox, SugarSync etc. “Pushing” your current set of files to Dropbox is done via:
$ homeboy-push
After pushing, the next time `homeboy’ is run on any configured machine, the .zip file will be unzipped into your home directory. It’s really not complicated, but saves time by having to make the same change a bunch of times across different machines and platforms, and having subtle differences.
When using the git options, homeboy assumes you have a single directory where all your clones are kept, such as ~/Developer/git. Every subdirectory that looks like a git clone will have ‘git pull origin master’ run inside it.
Pretty silly stuff, right? But hey, all I do is run `homeboy’ every morning I plan on doing development work on a machine, and sip on a cup coffee while everything is brought up to date. 🙂
Please help test and submit pull requests!
