Actions entry¶

The actions entry (optional) contains an actions mapping.

actions:
  <action-key>: <command-to-execute>

pre actions:

actions:
  pre:
    <action-key>: <command-to-execute>

post actions:

actions:
  post:
    <action-key>: <command-to-execute>

Actions can be either post or pre.

• post action will be executed after the dotfile deployment.
• pre action will be executed before the dotfile deployment.

If you don't specify either post or pre, the action will be executed after the dotfile deployment (which is equivalent to post). Actions cannot obviously be named pre or post.

Four types of actions can be defined:

• Dotfiles actions
• Default actions
• Profile actions
• Fake dotfiles and actions

Notes:

• Any action with a key starting with an underscore (_) won't be shown in output. This can be useful when working with sensitive data containing passwords, for example.
• Make sure to quote your actions to avoid bad surprises
• Actions are executed using the default shell ($SHELL)
• To use shell variables in your actions, you need to escape the curly brackets (${HOME} becomes ${{HOME}})

Fake dotfile and actions¶

Fake dotfile can be created by specifying no dst and no src (see Fake dotfiles and actions). By binding an action to such a fake dotfile, you make sure the action is always executed since fake dotfile are always considered installed.

actions:
  always_action: 'date > ~/.dotdrop.log'
dotfiles:
  fake:
    src:
    dst:
    actions:
    - always_action

Dynamic actions¶

Variables (config variables and dynvariables and template variables) can be used in actions for more advanced use-cases.

Actions accept arguments in the form {<arg-num>} which specifies which argument to replace in the action.

For example

dotfiles:
  f_test:
    dst: ~/.test
    src: test
    actions:
      - cookie_mv_somewhere "/tmp/moved-cookie"
variables:
  cookie_dir_available: (test -d /tmp/cookiedir || mkdir -p /tmp/cookiedir)
  cookie_header: "{{@@ cookie_dir_available @@}} && echo 'header' > /tmp/cookiedir/cookie"
  cookie_mv: "{{@@ cookie_header @@}} && mv /tmp/cookiedir/cookie"
actions:
  cookie_mv_somewhere: "{{@@ cookie_mv @@}} {0}"

or even something like this:

actions:
  log: "echo {0} >> {1}"
config:
  default_actions:
  - log '{{@@ _dotfile_key @@}} installed' "/tmp/log"
...

Make sure to quote the actions using variables.