DEV Community

How Do You Manage Dotfiles Across Environments and Machines

Ryan Palo on June 17, 2019

I'm looking for a better way of managing my dot/configuration files across multiple environments. What I'm Doing Currently I've got a d...

Read full post

Shawn McElroy • Jun 17 '19

I use stow. I have a repo where each folder in there, is a configuration for some thing. Like zsh, bash, vim, tmux, etc. Then I have a setup script that runs stow on everything i want to run it on. I also have a flag in there so if I run it as root, it installs only what root needs.

setup.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

git submodule init
git submodule update

base=(
    alacritty
    bash
    bin
    calcurse
    config
    gemrc
    nvim
    python
    ranger
    termite
    tmux
    trizen
    vifm
    w3m
    xonsh
    Xresources
    zsh
)

useronly=(
    cvim
    dunst
    fonts
    getkeys
    git
    gtk
    hyper 
    i3
    mpd
    mpv
    ncmpcpp
    node
    polybar
    rofi
    sxhkd
    sxiv
    transmission
    zathura
)

stowit() {
    usr=$1
    app=$2
    stow -v -R -t ${usr} ${app}
}

echo ""
echo "Stowing apps for user: ${whoami}"

for app in ${base[@]}; do
    stowit "${HOME}" $app 
done

for app in ${useronly[@]}; do
    if [[ ! "$(whoami)" = *"root"* ]]; then
        stowit "${HOME}" $app 
    fi
done

echo ""
echo "##### ALL DONE"

and each of those names like tmux is a folder in my repos dir. and when I install them I default to my home directory. so the command that is run equates to stow -v -R -t ${HOME} tmux for example. And the directory structure for each folder is like so:

 tmux
 ├── .tmux
 │  ├── .git
 │  ├── .tmux.conf
 │  ├── .tmux.conf.local
 │  ├── LICENSE.MIT
 │  ├── LICENSE.WTFPLv2
 │  └── README.md
 ├── .tmuxp
 │  ├── cs.yaml
 │  ├── rsk.old.yml
 │  └── rsk.yml
 ├── .tmux.conf
 └── .tmux.conf.local

so that will link the .tmux directory, into my $HOME directory. tmuxp is a python binary for managing preset tmux pane configs, like tmuxinator.

Lastly, in my .bashrc and .zshrc (i default to zsh) I check if the file $HOME/.env_secrets is available which will have api keys, and other secret keys and it NOT kept in git. This way i can manage secrets, db connections, etc. I would link mine, but it has stuff in it I dont want public. but if theres any part of the config you want to know about, just let me know.

I also have a _setup directory that has anything specific i want to run based on OS. such as installing applications. I run arch so I have a arch_setup.sh and an osx_setup.sh for installing things in homebrew. though that one is pretty out of date since i haven't updated it for osx in a while. As i have been using linux.

Now that I think about it, might be a good post to talk about how I have this setup. lol

One last thing, in the start of the setup script I make sure to get any submodules so I can pull in tmux/nvim configs I use that others make. that way I can still use them without maintaining them.

Ben Sinclair • Jun 18 '19

Stow is great.

Ryan Palo • Jun 18 '19

Wow! There is a lot here. Thank you! I haven’t even heard of stow, I’ll look into it. Thanks for such a detailed answer!

Shawn McElroy • Jun 18 '19

Of course. This "how to manage dotfiles" is a path I have treaded off an on for a long time. I have went through a handful of iterations. Sure there are tools out there that give you command line binaries to add/remove things in your env, but I found that they tend to over complicate things.

George • Jun 18 '19

I have a ~/.dotfiles directory that I put all my dotfiles in and store them on github.
I use .gitignore for any dotfiles that should only be local.
I have a script that will source all the files in that directory and i just point my ~/.bash_profile at the index.

Here is my git repo, its minimal, I dont use a huge amount of alias'.

Valentin Baca • Jun 17 '19

I'm in a similar boat. I also have a git repro for my dotfiles and I also make tiny tweaks that I forget to "push upstream," mostly in my .vimrc

It's not much help, but I honestly think I'll just stick with I've got. Since it's only used across 3-4 machines, it's not personally worth setting up something more complex or automated.

just my unhelpful $.02

Ben Sinclair • Jun 18 '19 • Edited

I use stow and a custom install script and just... remember to push and pull, I guess.

I do have conditionals in my configuration files where possible to let them work on systems I have to use for work as well as systems I prefer.
I've also experimented with using different branches for different systems, but that just seems like more trouble than it's worth to remember to commit stuff back to master when appropriate.

laggardkernel • Sep 7 '19 • Edited

Stow is a bad idea. It's a shit. It separated each config file into a folder with the same structure as your home directory, but not collect the conf files together in one main folder with that structure. And it doesn't have a builtin support for file grouping for different machines, or OS's.

Check the wiki page for dotfiles from archwiki for all kinds of tools.

If you want to group some of the confs for machine 1 and some for machine 2. The best grouping solution is provided by dotdrop, which group files by setting but not duplicating them to another folder.

Features of dotdrop

hooks to execute your own script
- do post-setup after script is deployed on a new machine
- encrypt or decrypt your confs
grouping confs for different machine by settings

Dan • Jun 18 '19 • Edited

What about putting all your .dotfiles in a cloud service like dropbox? It will keep everything in sync and you don't have to do anything as far as that is concerned.

The only thing you have to do is set up symlinks or source your .dotfiles from dropbox.
For point #1, #3, and #5, dropbox would be your friend.

You could still keep things in sync with a remote repo while using .gitignore for sensitive data. But if things are synced with dropbox then you are okay.

One issue is that if you need to build and deploy every time there is a change, you will need some cron job or maybe a file monitoring script (if file change then build and deploy).

edit: after I hit 'submit' I remembered that recently dropbox changed their pricing strategy. You used to be able to have unlimited number of devices synced. Now it's limited to 3 on the free plan. I don't know how many systems you have to sync with, but a cloud based storage of some kind might help - dropbox or otherwise

Ryan Palo • Jun 18 '19

Ohh that’s not a bad idea either. I’ll take a look at a few different cloud storage strategies. Thanks!

Ryan Will • Jun 17 '19 • Edited

I don't really have any good suggestions for the others, but for feature request 2 you could conditionally source files based on their existence. I do this with work related aliases and environment variables.

Elsa Gonsiorowski • Jun 18 '19

I keep all my dotfiles in a git repo (github.com/gonsie/dotfiles). The readme there has some details, but at a high level: I download the repo and keep that separate from my 'installed' dot files. I use a synch.sh script to synchronize the repo with what is installed and I use git to synchronize across machines. The synch script has some smarts and knows how to set up a new machine, otherwise, it diff's the repo and installed files to figure out what I've changed.

Nick Fode • Jun 18 '19

I can recommend yadm. It stores your dotfiles in a git repo.