🌱 Sprout

... because "just works" beats "highly configurable" every single time.

Sprout is a symlink and source dependency manager that just works. It's boring in the best possible way.

All I wanted was to organize my dotfiles and tools. Then I blinked, and suddenly I had a new Rust CLI and very strong opinions about symlinks. Could've gone outside, touch grass. Instead I implemented ln -s, but in fancy and with unit tests and colors.

You might be wondering: Why build yet another symlink tracker and source-based dependency manager? Why reinvent the wheel, the wrench, and the garage it lives in? Well...

• Ansible wants to SSH into your toaster to symlink a config.
• Chezmoi dreams of templating your entire life based on your hostname and the moon phase.
• Homebrew gives up if you want a specific Git commit or gasp a local build.
• Nix manages everything. Including your free time.
• GNU Make can technically do this. But now you're writing Makefiles for your dotfiles.

Sprout is simpler! It stays out of your way and does exactly what you ask: track configs, fetch sources, and builds dependencies. All versioned. All in one place. All in plain sight. No templating languages. No Turing-complete DSLs. No server orchestration cosplay just to install Neovim.

Just you, your tools, and your ${HOME} ... sprouted by hand.

Features

🔗 Dotfile Tracking & Symlinking

• Move your config files into /sprout/symlinks
• sprout symlinks add [--recursive] creates a symlink back to $HOME
• sprout symlinks status [--all] shows modifications, deletions, and optionally up-to-date files
• sprout symlinks restore repairs any missing or broken symlinks
• sprout symlinks rehash recalculates symlink hashes after manual changes
• sprout symlinks undo <path> removes symlinks and copies files back to original location
• Respects both .gitignore and .sproutignore

📦 Dependency Management & Declarative Build

• Declare Git repos or HTTP downloads (tarballs, zip files) in manifest.sprout
• sprout modules fetch [package] pulls and unpacks dependencies
• Embed shell commands and environment setup directly in manifest.sprout
• sprout modules build [package] [--dry-run] runs it in context (or just prints a ready‑to‑run script)
• sprout modules install [package] fetches and builds in one step
• sprout modules status [--expand] [--all] shows module status with build information and dependencies
• sprout modules hash [-i] computes and displays/updates module hashes
• sprout modules clean [--dry-run] removes unused cache/source directories
• Versioned directories and optional SHA256 checks for archives

🌍 Environment Management

• Declare environment variables (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.) directly in manifest.sprout
• Create named environment sets to group dependencies for different contexts
• sprout env edit [environment] interactively edit environment (toggle modules)
• sprout env list [environment] list environment sets and their modules
• sprout env generate [environment] generate environment export statements for a specific set

🚀 Quick Setup

1. Initialize a new sprout directory with example modules (defaults to /sprout)

sprout init --empty [path]

2. Add the following content to your manifest:

module cmake {
    depends_on = []
    exports = {
        PATH = "/bin"
    }
    fetch {
        http = {
            url = [https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases/download/v4.0.3/cmake-4.0.3-linux-x86_64.tar.gz](https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases/download/v4.0.3/cmake-4.0.3-linux-x86_64.tar.gz)
        }
    }
    build {
        ln -sf ${SOURCE_PATH}/cmake-4.0.3-linux-x86_64/bin ${DIST_PATH}
    }
}
module gcc {
    depends_on = []
    exports = {
        PATH = "/bin"
    }
    fetch {
        http = {
            url = [https://mirrors.ibiblio.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-15.1.0/gcc-15.1.0.tar.xz](https://mirrors.ibiblio.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-15.1.0/gcc-15.1.0.tar.xz)
        }
    }
    build {
        cd gcc-15.1.0
        ./contrib/download_prerequisites
        mkdir -p build
        cd build
        ../configure --disable-multilib --enable-languages=c,c++ --prefix=${DIST_PATH}
        make -j8
        make install
    }
}
environments {
    default = [cmake, gcc]
}

3. Build and Install Modules (will format the manifest and add sha256sum):

sprout modules install cmake
sprout modules install gcc

4. Activate the Environment (e.g., add to your .zshrc):

eval "$(sprout env generate)"

🔧 Git & Maintenance

• sprout status shows complete status (modules, symlinks, and git)
• sprout commit [-m "message"] commits all changes to git
• sprout push pushes changes to remote git repository
• sprout edit [path] edits manifest.sprout with $EDITOR and validates syntax
• sprout format [-i] [path] verifies and reformats manifest.sprout

Directory Layout

/sprout
├── symlinks/              # Tracked symlinks
│   └── .zshrc
├── sprout.lock            # Lockfile (portable hashes)
├── dist/                  # Build artifacts (install output)
│   ├── neovim/
│   ├── ...
│   └── ripgrep/
├── sources/
│   ├── git/               # Git repos (as submodules)
│   └── http/              # Extracted HTTP downloads (tarballs, zip files)
├── cache/
│   └── http/              # Cached downloads (.tar.gz, .zip, etc.)
├── manifest.sprout        # Metadata manifest (alphabetically sorted)
├── .gitignore             # Sensible defaults
├── .git                   # Your own Git repo (optional)

Manifest Structure

Dependencies in manifest.sprout can declare environment variables they need:

Note: Comments in .sprout files start with #. However, Sprout may reformat the manifest when adding/removing modules, which will remove comments. Keep important documentation in a separate README or inline in build scripts.

See the example manifest.

When you run sprout env, it generates shell export statements.

Tree-sitter Support

Sprout includes a Tree-sitter grammar for syntax highlighting .sprout files.

Setup for Neovim

cd tree-sitter-sprout
tree-sitter generate
tree-sitter build

# Copy queries to Neovim config
mkdir -p ~/.config/nvim/queries/sprout
cp queries/*.scm ~/.config/nvim/queries/sprout/

# Add to your Neovim config (init.lua)
vim.filetype.add({
  extension = { sprout = "sprout" },
})

local parser_config = require("nvim-treesitter.parsers").get_parser_configs()
parser_config.sprout = {
  install_info = {
    url = "~/git/github.com/patwie/sprout/tree-sitter-sprout",
    files = {"src/parser.c"},
  },
  filetype = "sprout",
}

Note: Neovim loads queries from ~/.config/nvim/queries/sprout/ first, then from nvim-treesitter's cache. After updating the grammar, copy the updated queries to both locations and restart Neovim.

Setup for tree-sitter CLI

# Add to ~/.config/tree-sitter/config.json
{
  "parser-directories": [
    "/path/to/sprout/tree-sitter-sprout"
  ],
  "language-associations": {
    "sprout": "sprout"
  }
}

# Test highlighting
tree-sitter highlight file.sprout