The goal is to mimick homesick in functionality so that it can be a drop-in replacement.

Functionality does however not include reliability. technicalpickles has created a ton of tests for his tool, I'm not going to do that.

If anyone were to send a pull request adding some kind of testing for this tool, I would be very grateful.

One advantage homshick has over homesick is the ability to install it easily without root privileges. To install a gem, not having root privileges makes the job a lot harder (in my experience). With homeshick you simply run the three commands listed below and you are done!

homeshick will be installed as your first castle. After that you can easily update it with homeshick pull homeshick.
In order to create the castle, simply download the install script and run it through bash.

curl -sL https://raw.github.com/andsens/homeshick/master/install.sh | bash

You can make homeshick accessible as an alias like this

printf '\nalias homesick="$HOME/.homeshick"' >> .bashrc

After having launched ec2 instances a lot, I got tired of installing zsh, tmux etc. Check out this gist.

In one line you can run a script which installs your favorite shell and multiplexer. It also installs homeshick, which then clones and symlinks your castle(s). To clone via ssh instead of https, you will need a private key.

You may however not trust the current server with agent forwarding, which is why the script contains variables to hold the unencrypted deploy key of your castles (available in the admin section of your repo). They will be added to the ssh-agent in order for git to be able to clone. Enjoy!