Chezmoi is a Good Dotfiles Manager
Previously I used yadm for my dotfiles, but I got frustrated with the way it worked across multiple machines. The templating just didn’t have the capabilities that I wanted it to, and I had an itch to try something new. I decided to switch to chezmoi, which promises things I want from my templating, including:
- user-defined variables (unique to each machine)
- conditionals
Chezmoi also has one feature I was really missing while using yadm, which is the ability to ignore files on some machines and not others. I want to manage my VPN config on one machine but not another, so it doesn’t seem worth it to have this configuration appear on all machines when it won’t be used.
My setup
These are the chezmoi features I ended up taking advantage of:
- sensitive file encryption with age (one time decrypt)
- templated files based on user-defined config values
I wanted to list some of the things I did that I think are interesting, because I didn’t see them talked about elsewhere.
My big challenge: Grinnell has MathLAN, which is a bunch of machines with NFS-shared
home dirs but nor much structure going on. They all have hostnames
Because of that, I decided to go with user-defined variables. In addition to setting variables for my email and whether to use GPG with git (two major differences between the two platforms), I added a “system” variable that I set either to “laptop” or “mathlan”. That lets me do things like not sync my sensitive files to MathLAN, since it’s not a very well-protected system.
