Comtrya is a dotfiles and workstation configuration manager written in Rust. It is aimed squarely at the problem of setting up a new laptop — installing packages, symlinking dotfiles, cloning repos, configuring macOS defaults — without the weight of Ansible, Chef, or Puppet.
Configuration is declared as YAML “manifests” containing a list of actions: package.install, file.link, file.copy, directory.create, command.run, git.clone, user.group, and more. Manifests declare dependencies on other manifests so Comtrya resolves them into a DAG and runs them in order. Package actions abstract over the underlying manager (Homebrew, apt, dnf, pacman, winget), so the same manifest can target macOS, Linux, and Windows with per-OS overrides via Tera templating.
Comtrya sits in the same niche as chezmoi, Nix Home Manager, and yadm, but trades Nix-level reproducibility for a lighter, more imperative model that feels closer to Ansible playbooks. It is a hobby-scale project — originally created by David Flanagan (Rawkode) — and best suited to individual workstation bootstrapping rather than fleet management.