rcm VS yadm

Compare rcm vs yadm and see what are their differences.

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rcm yadm
18 81
3,059 4,708
0.8% -
2.4 2.4
4 days ago about 1 month ago
Perl Python
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

rcm

Posts with mentions or reviews of rcm. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-05.
  • Fulfilling a reader's request for my “dot files”
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 May 2023
    I use https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm, which works smoothly and includes support for host-specific files
  • Don't Let Messy Dotfiles Ruin Your Coding Life! Try dotstow and Simplify Your Workflow Today!
    2 projects | /r/dotfiles | 27 Feb 2023
    Prior to catching the Nix brainworms and switching to home-manager, I mostly used thoughtbot/rcm.
  • Automatic setup
    2 projects | /r/linux | 10 Jan 2023
    Check out https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm
  • Thoughts on chezmoi
    4 projects | /r/dotfiles | 8 Oct 2022
    currently I am managing my dotfiles with rcm (ran by ansible). This approach served me well over the years but recently I stumpled over chezmoi.
  • Ask HN: How do you sync your computers development configurations/environment?
    33 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 May 2022
    I use a tool called rcm[0], which is essentially a set of shell scripts for managing symlinks from $HOME into $HOME/.dotfiles. $HOME/.dotfiles can then be a git repo.

    Some notes:

    1. rcm lets you decide make host-specific or host-agnostic dotfiles. For example, I can declare that I want a different `.ssh/config` file for each host, and rcm will figure out which `.ssh/config` to symlink based on the current machine's hostname.

    2. The installation process is very simple. It's just shell scripts, so you don't have to have a compiler. Operating system packages exist for the common platforms, and there's also a convenient way to "build" from source using configure && make && make install. The from source option is particularly convenient if you need to change the installation prefix to a user-writable location on a multi-user machine.

    3. I use SSH Agent Forwarding[1] to avoid needing to install private keys (either new keys or copies of existing keys) on all the hosts I manage. This lets me git push and pull to my dotfiles repo on all hosts.

    4. Taking it a step further, some shell config I have is host-specific (e.g., certain PATH modifications I only want to apply on certain hosts). Rather than use the host-specific dotfile feature of rcm for the whole .bashrc, I factor my shell config files into multiple files, that I then source. One of these files is called `$HOME/.util/host.sh`, which is host specific. Again, rcm creates a symlink from this to the correct host-specific file automatically by hostname.

    If you're curious to learn more about any of this, my dotfiles are public.[2]

    [0] https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm

    [1] https://docs.github.com/en/developers/overview/using-ssh-age...

    [2] https://github.com/jez/dotfiles

  • Syncing dotfiles with git
    2 projects | /r/git | 7 Apr 2022
  • Lmao "Thank you Linus"
    3 projects | /r/linuxmasterrace | 18 Nov 2021
    rcm is essential if you use multiple machines.
  • What's the point of a "dotfiles" repository?
    2 projects | /r/linuxquestions | 14 Sep 2021
    You already got a good amount of reasons from other comments. Just a sidenote: there are also dotfile managers that try to help with the mess. I personally use rcm ( https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm ) as it has a Deb repo and is portable as it's written in bash. I recommend looking into it. I have all my dotfiles in place on a fresh install with 3-4 commands in the terminal.
  • First release of Hoard dotfile manager
    2 projects | /r/rust | 3 Jun 2021
    Hoard is a program that backs up sparse files from across your filesystem into a single location and can later restore them. Some of you might know programs like this as "dotfile managers," like RCM and Chezmoi.
  • How do you manage your dotfiles?
    20 projects | /r/neovim | 2 Mar 2021
    I use rcm, which is made by the folks at Thoughtbot. It's dead-simple—it just creates symbolic links in place of files. I'd highly recommend it for a simple and quick approach.

yadm

Posts with mentions or reviews of yadm. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-07.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing rcm and yadm you can also consider the following projects:

GNU Stow - GNU Stow - mirror of savannah git repository occasionally with more bleeding-edge branches

chezmoi - Manage your dotfiles across multiple diverse machines, securely.

Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]

dotbot - A tool that bootstraps your dotfiles ⚡️

homesick - Your home directory is your castle. Don't leave your dotfiles behind.

Ansible - Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.

git-submodules - Git Submodule alternative with equivalent features, but easier to use and maintain.

homeshick - git dotfiles synchronizer written in bash