Dotfiles Starter Repository

A starter repository to get you started with chezmoi and your precious config files on your system (dotfiles).

How Does It Work?

This repository acts as a repository for chezmoi. The tool chezmoi manages your configuration files between a Git repo to your $HOME directory (or somewhere else).

In this repo only zsh and git config files are managed for you as a starter config. The ZSH setup is a nice structured setup which provides the basic.

The tool chezmoi default behavior works by first initiating it with chezmoi init <repo> which will clone the <repo> by default to ~/.config/local/chezmoi. Any chezmoi apply will take managed files in your config and apply it to your $HOME folder (if you made change for any managed files in your home folder, chezmoi will prompt you to overwrite).

Usage

Create Your Dotfiles from This Template

Either use this repository on Github as a template (i.e. "Use this template") or create your own repository with clone url = ... (e.g. on Github) to fork this template repository (you cannot make forks private!) and make it private, that is:

cd ~/myrepos
git clone https://github.com/sdsc-ordes/dotfiles.git

# Replace `<url>` with your repository url.
cd dotfiles &&
    git remote set-url origin "<url>" &&
    git push

Configure .chezmoi.yaml.tmpl

Edit the file .chezmoi.yaml.tmpl to fit your needs. That means change the git.userName and git.userEmail values for example. Configure other files to your needs.

Initialize

Then on the machine where you want to apply this dotfile setup:

chezmoi init <url>

Apply

Then apply the dotfiles in this repository to your home folder ~/ with

chezmoi apply --dry-run --verbose

[!CAUTION] This will overwrite files managed in config in your home folder ~. To do it remove --dry-run.

Test in Container

You can test this dotfiles setup in this repo safely in a container by doing

just test-in-container
# or with docker
just container_mgr=docker test-in-container

This will log you into ZSH in a container (to not mess with your system) to test out the ZSH and Git settings and to get a look and feel of Chezmoi.

For the impatient do just test-in-container --apply, for the ones wanting a follow through jump through the next sections.

Initialize chezmoi

cd ~/workspace
chezmoi init ./

Apply all Configuration Files

cd ~/.local/config/chezmoi
chezmoi apply

and inspect the changes with

tree ~/.config

Login again into ZSH

zsh

Which will directly use all config files, install ZSH plugin on startup and present you with a nice prompt like this:

╭─     ~/.local/share/chezmoi on    master ·······························································································   impure
╰─❯