dotbot

What tools or methods do you use to manage your dotfiles? I'm Currently using dotbot[0], but I'm moving to a new machine soonish and want to take the opportunity to think about other avenues. [0] https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot

But not all things you might do with a dotfile (or, more generally, per-user customization) are just replacing files. Things like cronjobs, brew installs, `defaults` in MacOS, etc. Viewing dotfile-based customization as strictly files to obliterate with pre-existing files is needlessly myopic. For this broader problem, there are other more complete solutions that are more robust and flexible. Personally I like dotbot (https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot) as a balance between power and simplicity, particularly when managing files across multiple OS homedirs (e.g. linux server, macos laptop).

Symbolic links set up with dotbot[1]. Since the link directives are idempotent, you can run it on every login shell if you desire. I ended up setting up a shared jumpbox used by some contractors with it so they could work with our internal tooling without requiring excessive setup, and wrapped it into a shell startup script[2] and found it performant enough that I couldn't tell the difference. 1: https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot 2: https://gist.github.com/RulerOf/f41259f493b965c9354c2564d85b...

Many command line programs keep their configurations somewhere under $HOME. These are often called "dotfiles". If you ever use more than one machine, likely you'll want the same configuration available on all those machines.. so you'll want some way to copy them to a new machine. Some dotfile managers are quite simple, like dotbot. https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot Home Manager from the Nix community is a bit more sophisticated. It allows for writing configurations in the Nix language, which is nice if you know/like Nix. (Nix is a powerful/expressive package manager. Nix is to apt-get what vim is to notepad).

Dotbot (https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot) has worked extremely well for me. It’s simple to setup, has minimal dependencies, and it is also easy to run arbitrary commands if I want to get tricky with things. I would highly recommend it.

I do a similar thing, but with dotbot instead https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot

chezmoi [1] looks like a tool for power-users. I'll give it a try and see how it goes. It seems to be more capable (and more complex) than dotbot [2] [1] https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi [2] https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot#plugins

I like dotbot [0] and have been using it for a while. How do people manage secrets, I am encrypting with keybase, but really want to move away from it. [0]: https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot

Check out dotbot[1] and the brewfile[2] plugin 1: https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot 2: https://github.com/sobolevn/dotbot-brewfile

Similar to you I keep mine in a git repository, but I use dotbot[1] to manage the symlinks to the proper paths. [1] https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot

I've been experimenting with dotbot [1] for the last little bit and it is similar to what is described here. The main difference being that the placement of the dot files is configured in a JSON/YAML file instead of a directly structure. It doesn't have any external dependencies, unless you consider python an external dependency, but most all distros come with that built-in these days. It's not a management system either. It's just a tool for describing where to copy things to. So if you simply choose not to use it later it's not that difficult to migrate. [1] https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot/

A good starting point for versioning dotfiles is https://dotfiles.github.io/. I like to use Dotbot [1] for managing and installing my dotfiles, but there are plenty of other options listed. [1] https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot/

Scripting out your favorite settings, here’s an example: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos I use something similar, along with dotbot (https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot) to wire up other application’s settings files. There’s lots of good examples around to steal and tweak.