Dotctl

dotfile management

About

Dotctl is a tool to help you easily manage your dotfiles and sync them across separate machines using git. It creates a dotfiles subdirectory in the user's $HOME and provides simple commands to add and symlink config files/directories to the central dotfiles directory.

Quick Start (Bootstrap a fresh machine)

Option 1 — Shell script (no Go required):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Marcusk19/dotctl/main/install.sh | bash -s -- https://github.com/your-user/dotfiles.git

Option 2 — go install:

go install github.com/Marcusk19/dotctl@latest
dotctl apply https://github.com/your-user/dotfiles.git

Both methods clone your dotfiles repo to ~/dotfiles and link all tracked configs automatically.

Installation

go install

go install github.com/Marcusk19/dotctl@latest

Build From Source

Prerequisites

• go

Clone the repo and run the script to build the binary and copy it to your path:

git clone https://github.com/Marcusk19/dotctl.git
cd dotctl
make install

Usage

# init sets up the config file and directory to hold all dotfiles
dotctl init

# add a config directory for dotctl to track
dotctl add ~/.config/nvim

# create symlinks (idempotent, safe to re-run)
dotctl link

# bootstrap dotfiles on a fresh machine
dotctl apply https://github.com/your-user/dotfiles.git

Commands

Command	Description
dotctl init	Set up a new dotfiles repo and config
dotctl add <path>	Track a config file or directory
dotctl link	Create symlinks for all tracked configs
dotctl apply <repo-url>	Clone a dotfiles repo and link everything (bootstrap)

Flags

Flag	Description
--dry-run	Show what would be done without making changes
--overwrite	Overwrite existing files when linking
--no-backup	Skip creating backups of existing files