After installation, Hamstercage is available on the path as hamstercage.

In most cases, you will want to run Hamstercage as root, for example by using sudo. This is necessary to access files your user doesn’t have access to, but only root.

Creating a new Hamstercage repo

Hamstercage needs a manifest file in order to track files managed through it. You can create this file manually, or you can have Hamstercage create a template file for you:

hamstercage init

This creates hamstercage.yaml in the current directory.

Adding one or more files to the repository

To add one more files, directories, or symbolic links to the repo, use the add command. You will need to specify which tag these files should be added to.

For example, to add /etc/profile to the all tag, use:

sudo hamstercage add all /etc/profile

Applying contents from the repository to the target

When files in the repository are updated, for example, because you have made changes to a file in a tag used by multiple hosts, use the apply command.

sudo hamstercage apply