Dploy

Dploy is a tool for creating symbolic links similarly to GNU Stow. It is provided as a CLI tool and Python 3.10+ module and supports Windows, Linux, and OSX.

Dploy's command stow creates symbolic links to the contents of packages in a specified destination directory. Repeating the stow command with the same arguments will confirm that the contents of the package have been symbolically linked.

Dploy's command unstow removes symbolic links that resulted from stow commands. Repeating the unstow command with the same arguments will confirm that the links to stowed packages have been removed.

Installation

• Latest Release: pip install dploy
• Development Version: pip install git+https://github.com/arecarn/dploy.git

Basic CLI Usage

• dploy stow <package-directory>... <destination-directory>
• dploy unstow <package-directory>... <destination-directory>
• dploy clean <package-directory>... <destination-directory>
• dploy --help

Rationale

Dploy started out as simple Python script to create symbolic links to my dotfiles for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Over time I keep improving and tweaking my script to suit my needs, but I was running into a problem. Keeping all the files I wanted to link in a config file was becoming a real pain in the neck.

I started looking for another solution to solve my problem, and found many alternatives but none of them seemed to be a good fit. The solution that seemed the most promising was using GNU Stow. It seemed like the most simple elegant solution to the problem. The only issue was that it didn't support Windows.

Then I thought to myself, why can't I just create my own version of Stow that work on Windows, Linux and OSX. So after that my I started morphing simple python script into what would become Dploy and learned a lot more about python in the process.

How does it compare with GNU Stow?

Below are just a few few major points of comparison between GNU stow and Dploy.

• Like GNU Stow Dploy runs in two passes. First by collecting the actions required to complete the command and verifying that the command can completed without any issues. If no issues are detected then the second pass executes these actions are execute to complete the command. Otherwise Dploy will exit and indicate why the command can not be completed. This way a stow or unstow operation is atomic and never partially done.

• Like Stow, Dploy supports tree folding and tree unfolding. Like Stow's --no-folding, passing --no-folding to stow or unstow disables folding, so each file gets its own link inside a real directory.

• Unlike Stow, Dploy requires an explicit package(s) and a destination directory.

• Unlike Stow, Dploy does not have any concept of ownership, but will only operate on symbolic links and the creation or removal of directories for these symbolic links.

• Unlike Stow, Dploy's unstow removes a destination directory that becomes empty as a result of removing its symbolic links, even if that directory existed before stow created any links inside it. Dploy keeps no state across invocations, so it cannot distinguish a directory it created from one that already existed.

• stow's --skip-conflicts flag is the one opt-in exception to the atomicity described above: files that conflict with an existing, unmanaged destination entry are skipped and reported, while every other file in the package is still linked. dploy exits with status 2 when this happens, so a script can tell a partial stow apart from a full success (status 0) or a fatal error (status 1).