Like many Unix hackers who move around from machine to machine I often found I spent a lot of time messing around setting up my environment. Eventually I moved all my dotfiles into version control and scripted up some quick set-up instructions.

Bootstrapping

This basically runs un-trusted shell script from the internet. You shouldn’t do it unless you are confident it won’t hose your system. I offer no such guarantees ;-)

wget -O - https://raw.github.com/stsquad/dotfiles/master/bootstrap.sh | bash

Layout

This repository contains “dotfiles” for bash and a whole bunch of other bits and pieces. The script setup_dotfiles.sh will symlink all the files in their correct place. Currently if you add new files it needs to be re-run.

Bash files

Each “dotbash_${FEATURE}” file is translated to ~/.bash_${FEATURE}. The main .bash_profile code runs some basic tests to see if it’s worth loading the snippet:

load_extra_module keys ssh-agent gpg-agent keychain

~/.config

Files in dotconfig are treated the same although the sub-directory is created for them by the setup script.

Per-user or machine files

Sometimes you want to only have certain setups for different users or machines. This is dealt with by pre-pending the dotfile with ${USER} or ${HOSTNAME}. Currently dotconfig directories are not supported.

Things I want to fixup one day [0/2]

Make .bash_profile search the repository

There is no reason the sub-modules couldn’t be kept in a directory in the repository to avoid cluttering up ~

Make the dotfiles work with zsh

In theory it should be compatible, I need to try this out.