Dotary

Dotary is an open-source software project that provides a lightweight framework for building and orchestrating small, modular command-line tools and automation tasks. The project is designed to be simple to learn, portable across major operating systems, and easy to extend through plugins and reusable components.

Core concepts include dotlets (small, reusable units of functionality), a declarative configuration file named dotary.yaml, and a minimal runtime that loads modules at startup. Dotary aims to support both local and remote execution, allowing users to compose workflows from independent dotlets and share them via a registry or repository.

Technical architecture: a core runtime written in a systems language with bindings to higher-level languages; a plugin system; a sandboxed execution environment; deterministic configuration. It includes a lightweight package and dependency management mechanism, enabling versioned modules.

Usage: Users initialize a project with dotary init, add dotlets, configure pipelines in dotary.yaml, and run tasks with dotary run. It supports templating, environment isolation, and basic logging. Because of its focus on dotfile management and configuration tasks, Dotary is used by developers and system administrators to automate setup and maintenance tasks.

Reception and ecosystem: Dotary has a modest but growing community and active maintenance on its repository. Critics note the project is still early-stage with a limited ecosystem and documentation relative to larger automation frameworks, but praise its simplicity and modular design.