In the good old days I managed all my personal configurations and scripts manually. Then I got tired of setting up the same things over and over when switching to a new or different computer. Keeping my personal machine, my working machine, my personal server as identical as possible became quite cumbersome.
So there came the time when I wanted to automate the whole stuff as much as possible. This dotfiles project is the result (or let's call it work in progress) of me wanting to have all my stuff both versioned and easy to access at any time from any location.
As with many projects, I'm standing on the shoulders of great people and have recklessly copied ideas and configurations from many sources, most prominently Zach Holman and Ryan Bates.
My personal collection of shell scripts, configuration files, and other resources, also known as dofiles.
They're first and foremost designed to work on macOS, as that's my primary operating system both on my personal machine and my working machine. Second class support is given to Linux as that's what my personal server is running on.
The project itself is not really designed to be used "as is" by anyone else but may serve as an idea of how your personal dotfiles could be structured. I'm far from suggesting that my stuff works for everybody – but if you do find it interesting, fork it, remove what you don't use, and build on what you do want to use.
Not all dotfiles apply to all my machines. Some scripts are only relevant on a macOS machine, while others are only relevant on a Linux machine.
To achieve this, the dotfiles are grouped into profiles.
All profile-specific scripts and settings are stored inside the profiles folder. Each subfolder within the profiles folder represents a separate set of dotfiles specific to that profile.
A profile becomes active (and thus all dotfiles of that profile will be included) depending on the following profile activation criteria:
- The
defaultprofile will always be activated. - The
macosprofile will be activated if the initialization script discovers that it's running on macOS. - The
linuxprofile will be activated if the initialization script discovers that it's running on Linux.
An additional profile will be activated that resides outside the dotfiles installation folder. This will allow you to have machine-specific configurations that are not part of the dotfiles repository. The addtional profile will be sourced from the folder ~/.dotfiles-local-profile/ if the folder exists.
There are a few special folders and files inside the hierarchy.
- profiles/PROFILE_NAME/bin/: The
bin/folder of a profile will be appended to the$PATH. - profiles/PROFILE_NAME/fbin/: The
fbin/folder of a profile will be prepended to thefpath. - profiles/PROFILE_NAME/zshrc.d/**/*.zsh: All files ending with
.zshwill get loaded into the shell environment. - profiles/PROFILE_NAME/home/: All files within the
homedirectory will get symlinked into their corresponding files below the current users home directory (~). So for example, the file~/.dotfiles/profiles/PROFILE_NAME/home/Library/Application Support/karabinerwill be translated to the actual target folder~/Library/Application Support/karabiner. The symlinks will be created/updated each time a new ZSH shell is opened.
Make sure Homebrew is installed and available in your PATH.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
/opt/homebrew/bin/brew install coreutils git direnv antigen curl fzfgit clone https://github.com/perdian/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
ln -s -f ~/.dotfiles/.zshrc ~/.zshrcThe necessary dependencies will be installed and will be available when opening a new ZSH shell.
Some necessary system tools might be missing, so to be on the safe side, make sure to install the following system components before calling the install script:
sudo apt -y install dialog curl git zsh python3 vim fzf nano direnv
sudo chsh -s /bin/zshgit clone https://github.com/perdian/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
ln -s -f ~/.dotfiles/.zshrc ~/.zshrc