I want to manipulate my dotfiles setup from makefiles like this:

workmachine:
	indite -w machine.at_work=true localrc
	...

So that make workmachine will set everything up and change the local setup specific to the machine.

Tests for this setup in other places look like this if [ $(indite -r machine.at_work localrc) = "true" ];....

The file format indite understands is quite simple:

# Header comments
# Header comments
[section1]
key=value
key=value # entry comment

[section2]
# Section comment
# Section comment
key=value # entry comment
key.subkey=value

indite allows to read values with -r keypath, and setting values with -w keypath=value.

The key path has the form `section.key[.subkey]`. The existence of subkeys is of no concern to indite, there is no im- or explicit tree structure.

indite is written in hare.

If -r is given, indite uses stdlibs format::ini parser.

To preserve the sequence of settings and comments, if -w is given, indite reads the complete ini file into memory, without optimization considerations for now. The current implementation is straight forward. This is my first contact with hare, and the only goal for now is a working tool for my use case.

Line comments (lines starting with #) are only allowed at the beginning of the file and directly after a section-start. If you alter a file with line comments else where, they will change place and be all gathered at the allowed place.

Entry comments (anything after the first `#` after the value) will be kept on subsequent changes to the entry. To remove a comment, an empty comment has to be set (see the man page).

The ini file can be given as `-`, indite will read from stdin and write to stdout in that case (see the man page).

If the section name contains full stops, these have to be escaped, e.g. indite -r www\\.example\\.org.login credentials.ini

indite is part of my dotfiles project. Report bugs and ideas by opening tickets or writing to the public-inbox mailing list. You can drop in a possibly very asynchronous conversation on IRC