6. Miscellaneous features - SuperCuber/dotter GitHub Wiki

Running dotter watch will make it run continuously and wait for changes in the repository, deploying when they happen.
This is helpful to mitigate the disadvantage of templates - it will update them instantly when you modify them, making them "feel" like symlinks while it runs (at least in the source → target direction).

Dotter supports hooks - files which are executed when a certain action happens. Currently supported:

• Before a deploy, at .dotter/pre_deploy.sh
• After a deploy, at .dotter/post_deploy.sh
• Before an undeploy, at .dotter/pre_undeploy.sh
• After an undeploy, at .dotter/post_undeploy.sh

Note that these files are rendered as a template, which means they can use all of the logic and variables that a regular templated file can.
Use this for example with the dotter.packages variable to turn on/off sections of such a script.

On linux, the template is cached in .dotter/cache/.dotter/pre_deploy.sh, and the rendered contents are piped into sh.
On windows, the file is rendered to .dotter/cache/.dotter/pre_deploy.bat and then executed directly.

If local.toml file is not found, Dotter will look for a file named <hostname>.toml using the machine's hostname. If you're not sure what file this is looking for, then:

• Make sure there is no local.toml
• Run dotter -v
• Look for the message saying local.toml not found, using SOMETHING.toml instead (based on hostname)

When using the -p/--patch flag, standard input will be taken as an additional step on top of local.toml's [files] and [variables] - use this for ad-hoc modifications to the configuration, for example

dotter -p <<<"variables.font_size = 20"

This is using bash's here-string. Other shells have similar features allowing this as well (see also heredoc)