Rootbeer

Deterministically manage your system configuration with lua!

This tool aims to make managing your system configuration easy. You can think of it as a tool that's very similar in function to home-manager. The idea is that you can define exactly how you want your system (or userland) to be configured within a lua script and then run the tool to apply those changes to your system.

Why not Nix? I have plenty of reasons why I don't like Nix which I go into on my blog post. However, I'm also not a fan of the nix language and wanted to see if I could make something similar with a language that is fully functional, scriptable, and has good error messages (lua). Also, this is a fun project to work on!

Goals

At the moment this project will not work if you try to compile it. Much of the functionality is just flat out missing and is TODO.

• Be able to define system configurations in a lua script
• Maintain a store of configurations, allowing rollbacks and revisions
• Interface with OS-specific tools to apply configurations
  • Package managers such as brew on macOS or dnf on Fedora
  • Daemon services such as launchd on macOS or systemd on Linux

Technical Components

I plan on extracting this out to separate documentation later, but here's a quick overview of the technical components of this project and how they all work together. The end result is rootbeer, a CLI tool to control everything.

Here are the components:

• An embedded LuaJIT interpreter to load and evaluate lua scripts. All of the functionality provided by Rootbeer will be exposed to the lua script via the rootbeer module.

• A store system to manage configurations. This will be similar to Nix's store system, where configurations are stored in a directory and can be rolled back or revised.

• A pluggable module system that serves as the basis of all functionality offered by Rootbeer. The idea is that different integrations with the OSes can be written as modules and compiled in-tree to ship in the final binary.