What is Rootbeer?

At a high level, Rootbeer is a tool used to manage your system's configuration using Lua scripts. It has a wide variety of use cases and supported concepts, but at its core, Rootbeer is a souped-up dotfiles manager. It's similar in spirit to tools like chezmoi and home-manager.

INFO

Rootbeer is still very much a work in progress and is adding new features. The idea is to eventually go as deep as covering packaging and system services.

Core Concepts

Config is Code

Your Rootbeer config is Lua, that's it. You get the expressiveness of a full programming language to build your system configuration. There's no special syntax.

-- An example of one of our high-level modules for managing Zsh configs.
-- When running `rb apply`, this will generate the appropriate files
-- including `.zprofile` and `.zshrc` with the options.

local zsh = require("rootbeer.zsh")
zsh.config({
    keybind_mode = "emacs",
    options = { "CORRECT", "EXTENDED_GLOB" },
    env = {
        EDITOR = "nvim",
        VISUAL = "$EDITOR",
    },
    aliases = {
        g = "git",
        ls = "lsd -l --group-directories-first",
    },
    history = { size = 10000 },
    evals = { "mise activate zsh" },
})

Plan, then Execute

Rootbeer is built around a two-phase model:

1. Planning: Evaluate your config, build a plan of the desired state, compare it to the current state of the system, and figure out what changes need to be made.

2. Execution: Using a list of planned changes, execute them in a single run. The idea is to be idempotent and only make changes when necessary. If you run rb apply twice in a row, the second run should be a no-op.