estenssorog
Easy Dotfiles with Chezmoi.
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Introduction

I highly recommend the free MIT course: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education.

When I first took the course a few years ago the dotfiles section spawned something I hadn't considered. While I was long familiar with ubiquitous dotfiles (i.e. .bash_profile or .vimrc) for settings management, I never thought about managing or versioning them! And I especially never considered making them usable across machines.

While it turns out a lot of people have had this realization, I set out for a management solution.

I looked at a few tools and even started using GNU Stow for a while, but that was before I found Chezmoi.

Chezmoi is a command-line tool that wrangles your dotfiles chaos. It takes care of synchronization, versioning and sharing, allowing you to keep a consistent environment across various systems. It is easy to get started with and dotfiles can be added gradually over time.

See my dotfiles repo managed by Chezmoi.

Common Commands

Here are commands you'll use 95% of the time, but Chezmoi is capable of much more. See Chezmoi features below.

# add a dotfile to Chezmoi management
chezmoi add ~/.zshrc

# edit a dotfile file
chezmoi edit ~/.zshrc

# see the change that would be applied
chezmoi diff

# apply the change
chezmoi apply

# change to the chezmoi directory to commit changes
chezmoi cd

Chezmoi Features

  • Version Control: Chezmoi is built on top of Git, making it easy to track changes, revert to previous versions, and understand updates.

  • Variation Across Machines: Your work and personal laptop can have slightly different settings while maintaining the same base configuration.

  • Security: Securely manage passwords, API keys, or other sensitive data within your dotfiles through encryption, integrating with password managers like 1Password or by ignoring files.

  • Advanced Features:

    • Templates: Templates make it easy to handle differences across machines without duplicating files.

    • Scripts: Automate post-apply tasks with scripts. For example, you might want to reload your shell configuration or restart services after applying new dotfiles.

    • Encryption: Secure sensitive files like SSH or GPG keys using encryption, ensuring they're safe even when your dotfile repository is public.