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Automatic Vim PlugUpdate

Posted on One min read

This post was inspired by this Reddit thread.

I use vim-plug to handle my vim plugins and I want to keep my plugins up-to-date. Ideally, this would be done automatically but I don’t want to suddenly have a broken vim setup. Luckily, vim-plug comes with a snapshot feature.

I save the following as ~/bin/vimplug_update.

#! /usr/bin/env bash
vim_cmd="nvim"
BACKUP_DIR="$HOME/.vimplug_snapshots"
BACKUP_FILE="$BACKUP_DIR/snapshot_$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S").vim"

mkdir -p "$BACKUP_DIR"

$vim_cmd -c "PlugSnapshot $BACKUP_FILE" +qa
$vim_cmd +PlugUpdate +qa

Then I set a daily cron job by running crontab -e and writing @daily ~/bin/vimplug_update. If I ever have to restore my settings, I run

vim -S snapshot_2019-08-05-085852.vim