Hooks

Bombadil's hooks are shell commands invoked before and after your dotfiles have been symlinked. They are useful if you need to reload some component manually after updating your dotfiles.

Default profile hook

Hooks are defined under the default profile section in Bombadil's configuration. In the example above, sway reload will run when running bombadil link to update any changes made to sway UI.

dotfiles_dir = "bombadil-example.toml"

[settings]
prehooks = [ "echo \"Updating dots\""]
posthooks = [ "sway reload" ]

The default hooks will always run regardless of the activated profiles.

Profile hooks

If you maintain a profile per window manager you might want to leave the default profile hooks empty and manage per profile hooks :

[settings]
prehooks = [ "echo \"Updating dots\""]
posthooks = [ "echo \"Default profile\"" ]

[profiles.sway]
prehooks = [ "echo \"Sway profile\"" ]
posthooks = [ "sway reload" ]

[profiles.i3]
prehooks = [ "echo \"i3 profile\"" ]
posthooks = [ "i3-msg reload" ]

Limitations

• Hooks run in a sub-shell therefore, command meant to change your current shell environment won't work :

posthooks = [ "source /home/user/.zshrc" ] # This does not work !

• Environment variables won't be expanded unless you explicitly call a sub-shell :

posthooks = [ "echo $HOME" ] # This will print "$HOME"

posthooks = [ "zsh -c \"echo $HOME\"" ] # This works

That's it for hooks, in the next chapter we will see how to split your Bombadil config into multiple files.