Chezmoi
Chezmoi is the gate-keeper for managing my personal dotfiles. It enables seamless version controlling of dotfiles to enable easier recovery and sharing of dotfiles.
Install
Chezmoi is automatically installed by Nix during the bootstrap process.
Usage
Editing
To edit a dotfile:
By default, Chezmoi is configured to open files with VSCode. Editing the dotfiles directly in the home directory is not recommended as it bypasses the syncing that Chezmoi performs.
Once edits have been made, they must be applied before they will take effect in the home directory:
If the dotfiles were edited directly before calling this, a chance is given to not have the changes clobbered by performing a merge. Otherwise, the local dotfiles will be updated with the previous changes.
Note that some dotfiles have triggers that occur on edits. For example, the
.nixpkgs/darwin-configuration.nix automatically invokes
darwin-rebuild switch in order to apply the edits immediately.
Committing
Once changes have been tested they should be committed and pushed up to the remote repository. You can either change into the source directory directly and invoke git:
Or, you can invoke git through Chezmoi:
Templates
Some dotfiles appear as templates in the source directory (denoted with the
.tmpl file extension). When applied, these files create their respective files
in the home directory (i.e. dot_foo.tmpl becomes .foo).
Most templates make use of a secret integration for pulling down sensitive
information during an apply. See the docs for more details on how this
works.
Note that because of this secret integration, you may be prompted to
authenticate when performing an apply operation. This can be avoided by
specifying the exact file to apply and thus avoid having to apply templates
which rely on secrets: