First, I got Camping installed, bringing back fond memories of Ruby development. I then copied off the blog example, and created TreeHugger, a 427 line script that provides a web interface to edit the variables, and a plain text output for the shells to source.

This script, when run, allows some simple MVC actions to an sqlite3 database.

As you can see, I have some aliases here I want to send to all the subscribing hosts. Eventually, I want to add some detection functionality to the database (mostly reverse DNS lookups for host rule referencing). I just have to access /out to get my desired output:

# Treehugger Configuration
# Aliases
alias ai='sudo apt-get install'
alias aup='sudo apt-get update'
alias aug='sudo apt-get upgrade'

# Environment Variables

Now, to get this into bash. I looked into making the date command spit out pretty unique timestamps. Turns out you can do this with the nanoseconds format:

$ date +%s%N
1206926780157462141

I made it so wget saves the treehugger config to a tempfile using the somewhat random seed above as a filename suffix, and then I have my shell source it:

FILENAME=/tmp/treehugger-`date +%s%N`; 2>/dev/null wget -O $FILENAME  http://rofl.who/treehugger/out && source $FILENAME && rm $FILENAME

And now I have nice aliases on my laptop served up from my desktop as fresh as the shell:

hank@davros:~$ alias
alias ai='sudo apt-get install'
alias aug='sudo apt-get upgrade'
alias aup='sudo apt-get update'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'