vjpr/ideas

Personal idea tracker as Github issues.

ideas's Issues

How to tame repo root config files / dot files?

Most repos are full of tooling or library config files that insist they live in the root directory of a repo.

These include configuration for linting, code-formatting, text editor settings, transpilation, CI, git, runtime version, package management settings and manifest, testing, code coverage, etc.

Some are stubborn and need to be left where they are because their location is significant. E.g. package management manifests like package.json.

Others have a cli switch to allow a configurable location - although usually this adds a lot of complexity to your tooling because you have to configure your project run scripts, IDE tooling, or other tooling to use these switches. There are a lot though that don't allow their configuration to be copied.

Some tools allow declarative config to be placed in a common file such as a package.json or pyproject.toml.

I have a bunch of repos and I'd like to be able to use the same configuration for each of them.

A good first step would be to put all the various config files in a single tools folder that is easily copyable to other projects. Adjacent files could be used to provide custom config

I'm looking for some ideas on the best way forwards. Things I can think of:

• Push for a community-standard for config file configurability. Have a standard file like .tools.ini that would allow specifying the location of the config file to use for each tool.
• Build a wrapper script that would mock the filesystem for tools that don't have configurable file locations.
• Tooling lint tool. CLI tool that would advise on the best way to configure your projects to have minimal root-level config files. Maybe could extend it to be a linter for your directory structure. Maybe it can setup symlinks to organize things into a central tools dir and add the original file names to the top of the file.
• GUI tool to allow all configurations to be made through a web app or electron app.