Overview

You’ve spent time tweaking your computing environment. Everything operates the way you want. That’s fantastic! Then your hard drive fails, and the computer needs to be rebuilt. yadm can restore your configurations.

You get a new computer, and you want to recreate that environment. You probably want to keep both machines’ configurations in sync. yadm can help you coordinate the configurations between your machines.

You begin experimenting with new changes to your configurations, and now everything is broken. yadm can help you determine what changed or simply revert all of your changes.

yadm is like having a version of Git, that only operates on your dotfiles. If you know how to use Git, you already know how to use yadm.

• It doesn’t matter if your current directory is another Git-managed repository
• You don’t have to move your dotfiles, or have them symlinked from another location.
• yadm automatically inherits all of Git’s features, allowing you to branch, merge, rebase, use submodules, etc.

As so many others, I started out with a repository of dotfiles and a few scripts to symbolically link them around my home directory. This quickly became inadequate and I looked for solutions elsewhere. I’ve tried other tools, but I didn’t find all of the features I personally wished for in a single tool. This led to yadm being written with the following goals:

• Use a single repository
• Few dependencies
• Ability to use alternate files based on OS or host
• Ability to encrypt and track confidential files
• Stay out of the way and let Git do what it’s good at

Follow these links to install yadm or learn some simple steps for getting started with yadm.