The PlannedCopy Application

PlannedCopy (plcp) is another tool from my toolbox, an automated copy utility for Linux.

This is my solution for the task of managing configuration files, scripts and other files that need to be copied around, changed and stored in a safe place.

The idea behind the application is simple, but the implementation is quite complicated… :). I keep my configuration files, like many others do, in a Git repository. The task is to install this files to the places where they belong to, as automated as possible.

A minimal Git repository in /home/darkstar/configs looks like this:

.
├── emacs
│   ├── custom.el
│   ├── init.el
│   └── resource.yml
├── kde
│   ├── Shell.profile
│   └── resource.yml
├── linux
│   ├── ackrc
│   ├── bash_alias
│   ├── bash_profile
│   ├── bash_prompt
│   ├── bashrc
│   └── resource.yml
└── system
    ├── rc.firebird
    ├── rc.postgresql
    └── resource.yml

A project is a subdirectory under the root of the repository. In the example above there are three so called projects: emacs, kde, linux and system.

The application uses a configuration file named resource.yml in each project directory with the following information:

For example, an item in the resource.yml file looks line this:

---
resources:
  -
    destination:
      name: .ackrc
      path: '~/'
      perm: 0644
    source:
      name: ackrc
      path: linux

The plcp install linux command will copy and rename the linux/ackrc file to /home/user/.ackrc and will set the permissions to 0644.

The resource.yml configuration file is automatically generated/updated by the plcp resu linux command, but the destination path is initially undefined and have to be edited manually for every record.

Features

The features and also the commands of the application are:

The main commands:

• install - Install the files (copy files and set permissions);
• sync - Synchronize the configuration files - copy back to the repository;
• check - Compare the repository files with the installed versions;

Additional helper and info commands:

• config - Configure the application;
• repo - Manage the repository (clone only for now);
• resu - Manage the resource config files (create/update);
• diff - Run a diff utility on the repo files and the installed versions;
• list - Print a list of the projects in the repository;
• version - Print the current version;

The install and sync commands take an optional file name used for limiting the command to that specific file. The

Another feature, in the devel branch, is an optional project parameter for the list command, to print the files in the directory.

Installation

This is a Perl application built with Moose and MooseX::App and Dist::Zilla. It has many dependencies, so it’s not easy to install from source, but I will provide a package made with Cava Packager for the next release.

Update: Done, see the releases on GitHub.

Quick Usage

The initial configuration of plcp:

$ plcp config set --url ssh://user@host/path/git-repos/configs.git
$ plcp config set --path /home/user/configs

Clone the repository in the HOME dir:

$ plcp repo clone

Add/update the resource.yml file in the emacs directory using:

$ plcp resu emacs

Edit the emacs/resource.yml file and set the destination path for all the items.

Finally install the files with:

$ plcp install emacs

The project is “work in progress” on GitHub and is open source. I use it almost every day, but it has a few known bugs and probably many unknown bugs.