I just released the beta version of a new open-source project I put together over the weekend. Gitfile is a lightweight package manager for installing and updating software from git repos. It’s great for installing odd things that live on GitHub and can’t be installed with typical package managers. I built it because there are several things I wanted to include with my dotfiles that can’t be installed with brew, gem, npm, pip or any other common package managers. They’re things like tmux plugins, rbenv plugins, and zsh plugins that I want to install automatically and update with a single command.
Gitfile is written in Go and I’d love contributions and ⭐️s. This was my first experience programming in Go. I haven’t been that interested in learning it because I’m so fond of the newer functional languages, but this type of cross-platform command line app seemed like the right use case. I got started in no time, and became productive more quickly than I ever have with any other language. For me, it’s a limited use case tool because it’s missing a lot of things I rely on when building big production apps. For utilities like this though, I’d use it again.