Introduction: Shit Hot Dotfiles • kolv.in

What are dotfiles

You’ve probably seen them before, files like .gitconfig + .ssh/config + .zshrc are considered dotfiles

They contain configuration for tooling running on your host which modifies how the tooling behaves

What problem does this solve

Version control your machine config
Automated setup of your machine setup
Cross-platform support
- Linux + MacosX + WSL
Easy to switch between different dotfile repositories
- Test yer pals dotfiles so you can slag thier shit setup then revert back to your own

Chezmoi is a shit hot tool that enables all this and it really cool 10/10

Prerequisites

Working knowlegde with git
Unix based CLI

Getting Started

The general idea is to store local tooling configuration into a git repo via chezmoi

First, Install Chezmoi
Create a git repo called dotfiles
Run chezmoi init to provision a local repo located at ~/.local/share/chezmoi
Run chezmoi add ~/.zshrc to add your first host file to your new local repo
Run chezmoi cd to head over to your local dotfile repo
Configure local repo remote origin

git remote add origin [email protected]:<uname>/dotfiles.git
git branch -M main
git add .
git commit -m "feat(zsh): inital commit of .zshrc file"
git push -u origin main

Congrats, you just committed your first dotfile 🎉

Tracking Changes

chezmoi edit ~/.zshrc
chezmoi -v apply
chezmoi cd

git add .
git commit -m "feat(zsh): updated .zshrc with alias"
git push

Its the circle of life

SSH keys

This topic has a dependancy on a 1Password account

Coupling Chezmoi with a password manager is another really powerfull feature that I love

Instead of generating new SSH keys each time you move machine, you can store SSH keys into your password vault and configure your SSH agent to read your keys from the password vault

Meaning you can clear out all your keys in ~/.ssh

See here for how to configure

Homebrew

I find homebrew pretty slow but its nice that you can install it on Linux + MacosX + WSL

This provides us a constant way to manage our dependencies and tooling, using 1 tool across 3 different operating systems

Yum

ZSH

I run ZSH which is a Unix shell built ontop of bash, it has many features

I mainly use it for

automatic cd
themes and plugin support via oh-my-zsh framework

# before
cd ~/dev/kolvin/projects
# after
~/dev/kolvin/projects

Although @electrocally is trying to pull me over to fish which i am interested in learning

Vscode Settings

Another cool benifit is tracking your vscode settings.json

As mentioned above, if you track changes to move to a new machine then youll noticed your configuration gets applied

But with the caveat that the settings.json file location is different per different operating system, ive still to implement support for this in my own repo for both Linx + WSL

Currely using MacosX the most

But VScode also offers a native solution to this called settings sync