Declarative workstation management
Station is a tool that lets you declaratively manage the programs and configuration files on your personal computer. Think of it like Terraform for your laptop.
Station configuration files are written in Common
Lisp. The default Station configuration file
is ~/.config/station/config.lisp, but you can tell Station to use an
alternate configuration file by passing the -c/--config option.
A Station configuration consists of providers and resources. A
resource is a piece of state you want Station to manage, such as a
package installed from your package manager or a configuration
file. Providers are what tell Station how to manage types of
resources - for example, the homebrew provider exposes the
homebrew-package resource that allows Station to manage packages
installed from the Homebrew package manager for macOS.
Station keeps a record of all of the state it is managing. When you run Station, it loads your configuration file and compares the current state of your workstation with the desired state. If it detects that a change needs to be made, for example a program installed or a file changed, it generates an update plan, displays it, and asks for your approval to make the change. Station will never make changes to your computer (outside of manipulating its own state database) without explicit user approval.
Once a resource is being managed by Station, subsequent changes to that resource made outside of Station will be reverted next time Station is run. For instance, if Station is managing a configuration file and you edit that file outside of the Station configuration, next time you run Station your edits will be lost. This ensures that the Station configuration is always an up-to-date, reproducible snapshot of the desired workstation state.
It's not done yet :)
- Jeremy Dormitzer (jeremy.dormitzer@gmail.com)
Copyright (c) 2021 Jeremy Dormitzer (jeremy.dormitzer@gmail.com)
Licensed under the MIT License.