Sheldon
:bowtie: Fast, configurable, shell plugin manager
Install / Use
/learn @rossmacarthur/SheldonREADME
sheldon
Fast, configurable, shell plugin manager
Features
- Plugins from Git repositories.
- Branch / tag / commit support.
- Submodule support.
- First class support for GitHub repositories.
- First class support for Gists.
- Arbitrary remote scripts or binary plugins.
- Local plugins.
- Inline plugins.
- Highly configurable install methods using templates.
- Shell agnostic, with sensible defaults for Bash or Zsh
- Super-fast plugin loading and parallel installation. See benchmarks.
- Config file using TOML syntax.
- Clean
~/.bashrcor~/.zshrc(just add 1 line).
Table of Contents
📦 Installation
Nix
This repository is a flake, and can be installed using nix profile:
nix profile install "github:rossmacarthur/sheldon"
Homebrew
Sheldon can be installed using Homebrew.
brew install sheldon
Cargo
Sheldon can be installed from Crates.io using Cargo, the Rust package manager.
cargo install sheldon
In some circumstances this can fail due to the fact that Cargo does not use
Cargo.lock file by default. You can force Cargo to use it using the --locked
option.
cargo install sheldon --locked
Cargo BInstall
Sheldon can be installed using
cargo-binstall, which will
download the release artifacts directly from the GitHub release.
cargo binstall sheldon
Pre-built binaries
Pre-built binaries for Linux (x86-64, aarch64, armv7) and macOS (x86-64) are provided. These can be downloaded directly from the the releases page.
Alternatively, the following script can be used to automatically detect your host
system, download the required artifact, and extract the sheldon binary to the
given directory.
curl --proto '=https' -fLsS https://rossmacarthur.github.io/install/crate.sh \
| bash -s -- --repo rossmacarthur/sheldon --to ~/.local/bin
Building from source
Sheldon is written in Rust, so to install it from source you will first need to install Rust and Cargo using rustup. Then you can run the following to build Sheldon.
git clone https://github.com/rossmacarthur/sheldon.git
cd sheldon
cargo build --release
The binary will be found at target/release/sheldon.
🚀 Getting started
Initializing
Sheldon works by specifying plugin information in a TOML
configuration file, plugins.toml. You can initialize this file by running
sheldon init.
sheldon init --shell bash
or
sheldon init --shell zsh
This will create plugins.toml under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/sheldon, on most
systems this will be ~/.config/sheldon/plugins.toml. You can either edit this
file directly or use the provided command line interface to add or remove
plugins.
Adding a plugin
To add your first plugin append the following to the Sheldon config file.
# ~/.config/sheldon/plugins.toml
[plugins.base16]
github = "chriskempson/base16-shell"
Or use the add command to automatically add it.
sheldon add base16 --github chriskempson/base16-shell
The first argument given here base16 is a unique name for the plugin. The
--github option specifies that we want Sheldon to manage a clone of the
https://github.com/chriskempson/base16-shell
repository.
Loading plugins
You can then use sheldon source to install this plugin, generate a lock file,
and print out the shell script to source. Simply add the following to your
~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc file.
# ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc
eval "$(sheldon source)"
💻 Command line interface
Sheldon has three different types of commands.
initinitializes a new config file.lockandsourcedeal with plugin downloading, installation, and generation of shell source code.add,edit, andremoveautomate editing of the config file.
init
This command initializes a new config file. If a config file exists then this command does nothing.
For example
sheldon init
Or you can specify the shell.
sheldon init --shell bash
or
sheldon init --shell zsh
lock
The lock command installs the plugins sources and generates the lock file.
Rerunning this command without any extra options will not reinstall plugin
sources, just verify that they are correctly installed. It will always
regenerate the lock file.
sheldon lock
To update all plugin sources you can use the --update flag.
sheldon lock --update
To force a reinstall of all plugin sources you can use the --reinstall flag.
sheldon lock --reinstall
source
This command generates the shell script. This command will first check if there
is an up to date lock file, if not, then it will first do the equivalent of the
lock command above. This command is usually used with the built-in shell eval
command.
eval "$(sheldon source)"
But you can also run it directly to inspect the output. The output of this command is highly configurable. You can define your own custom templates to apply to your plugins.
add
This command adds a new plugin to the config file. It does nothing else but edit the config file. In the following command we add a GitHub repository as a source.
sheldon add my-repo --git https://github.com/owner/repo.git
An example usage of this command for each source type is shown in the Configuration section.
edit
This command will open the config file in the default editor and only overwrite
the contents if the updated config file is valid. To override the editor that is
used you should set the EDITOR environment variable.
For example using vim
EDITOR=vim sheldon edit
Or with Visual Studio Code
EDITOR="code --wait" sheldon edit
remove
This command removes a plugin from the config file. It does nothing else but
edit the config file. In the following command we remove the plugin with name
my-repo.
sheldon remove my-repo
Options
Sheldon accepts the following global command line options and environment
variables. You can also view all options by running Sheldon with -h or
--help. The value that will be used for the option follows the following
priority.
- Command line option.
- Environment variable.
- Default value.
--color <when>
Set the output coloring.
always: Always use colored output.auto: Automatically determine whether to use colored output (default).never: Never use colored output.
--config-dir <path>
Environment variable: SHELDON_CONFIG_DIR
Set the config directory where the configuration file will be stored. This
defaults to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/sheldon or ~/.config/sheldon.
--data-dir <path>
Environment variable: SHELDON_DATA_DIR
Set the data directory where plugins will be downloaded to. This defaults to
$XDG_DATA_HOME/sheldon or ~/.local/share/sheldon.
--config-file <path>
Environment variable: SHELDON_CONFIG_FILE
Set the path to the config file. This defaults to <config-dir>/plugins.toml
where <config-dir> is the config directory.
--profile <profile>
Environment variable: SHELDON_PROFILE
Specify the profile to match plugins against. Plugins wh
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