For a long time I used puppet to manage my dotfiles. Then for a while I used Ansible. But man, those are some heavyweight approaches. And (back then, at least) cross-platform support was iffy or inconsistent.

So I wrote this. It's intended to work anywhere you have have a POSIX shell, and to work really well anywhere you have a POSIX shell and git.

Older systems may only provide command -v as part of User Portability Utilities as it was flagged in The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6/ POSIX.1-2004, by The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7/POSIX.1-2008 it was standard. Some versions of checkbashisms will complain about this, however we check for this extension early on in the script.

Usage: sh conf.sh [-Uvulands] [-m "module module ..."]

      -U            Update all git submodules
      -u            List projects provided as git submodules
      -m            Run all listed modules
      -l            List available modules
      -n            Avoid making changes and echo commands instead
      -v            Be verbose
      -s            Sync all live configs to their repository origin
      -a            Install all modules
      -nv           Be verbose, don't change anything and show diffs
      -d            Extract documentation from this script

Examples:
  Install the vim, tmux and ssh modules:
    ./conf.sh -m "vim tmux ssh"

  Update all git submodules and install vim and tmux configs:
    ./conf.sh -Um "vim tmux"

  Discover what has changed between a local config and the repository copy:
    ./conf.sh -snvm "tmux ssh zsh"

  Synchronize the files in the repository with the live configs:
    ./conf.sh -s "tmux ssh zsh"

• bash (and POSIX compliant mode) 4.3.39(1)-release
• BusyBox v1.23.2
• dash 0.5.8.2
• ksh ABIJM 93v-
• mksh @(#)MIRBSD R50
• pdksh @(#)PD v5.2.14
• yash 2.37

• Encryption of certain configs
• Automatically set up config submodule repository
• Automatically construct a "configs" directory hierarchy
• Optional self-installation to $PREFIX
• Roll up self and configs into a single archive for easy transport
• Testing with: ash, zsh
• More unit testing