Master Your New Laptop Setup: Tools, Configs (dot Files), and Secrets!

[@DevOpsToolkit]

How do you setup your machine(s)?

[@evjow]

using chezmoi

[@sp3023]

also a big fan of chezmoi

[@mtik000]

I just run my Ansible script 😜 of course, now I'm thinking of changing.

[@DryBones111]

Nix home manager!

[@silverfish27]

Chezmoi

[@vimalneha]

Great information. This was an issue I was grappling with. You solved it in 10 minutes.

[@woodwose_scot]

A great explanation of how to work round some of the painful bits of getting a new machine! I have used both stow and yadm and slightly prefer yadm. It treats your homedir as a git repo and you just run e.g. `ydm add .bashrc` or `yadm add .config/starship.toml` then `yadm commit` and `yadm push`. The main advantage is that for newly generated dotfiles you don't need to remember to copy them into a repo dir and push it, and there's no symlink confusion.

[@mauquer81]

This is what I needed! Thank you !!

[@IvanRizzante]

Thanks for another great video, nice approach to first time setup it's definitely worth a try

[@andreasb.7467]

I replaced stow with nix and its home-manager. It installs all packages and sets up all the configs across all my machines on multiple platforms. Really nice, but it took quite while to learn the nix language..

[@leonidgrishenkov]

stow is a really nice utility for this purpose)

[@slim5782]

Others have mentioned it, but i also like nixos/home-manager because it forces me to put it in git. My old dotfiles were no longer synced because the system didn't force me to and then when i installed a new machine it still took extra time. In that sense nix is like argocd, it forces you to put it in git/do it the right way. All tough as you've noticed, learning/working with nix can be a pain.

[@Artazar77]

I would also mention Brewfile in this context

[@keptmarvelous]

What are the disadvantages of using Ansible for that? It’s fairly easy to install required packages across different systems and symlink config files to the right locations. I guess it’s not relevant to you because you have Devbox but I’m still interested in your opinion on Ansible.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

To be honest I haven't used Ansible for a long while now. Ever since Terraform appeared I replaced Ansible with it so Im not sure what the current state of Ansible is. That being said, if you are using Ansible, it makes perfect sense to use it for managing dot files.

[@keptmarvelous]

@@DevOpsToolkit Thanks, Viktor!

[@90hijacked]

ive been hearing about stow for years, but never dove into it are there any distinct advantages to just using bare git repo set to hide untracked files ?

[@DevOpsToolkit]

You could do that. The risk is that a tool will create a config file you don't want to keep or that there will be a secret somewhere. I feel that this is a better solution since it let's you control (easier) what is intentional config you want to keep and what is not. That being said, using a git repo directly with well organized .gitignore should do as well.

[@90hijacked]

@@DevOpsToolkit if you set status.showUntrackedFiles to false, you will have to git add --force on any file that is not already tracked tho, could run gitleaks precommit hook also :)

[@MichellGailing]

why dont you add fzf, bat etc. into the devbox? couldnt you simply put everything into the devbox and just move the devbox.json to the machines?

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I could... My logic is that the tools that are required to work on a project are defined in that project. Bat, for example, is not one of those, especially since I have it aliased to cat. More importantly, there are a few (not many) tools that i need before I even reach a project. Those are the ones i keep as global.

[@javisartdesign]

oh my god, too many tools so interesting

[@rtacconi]

Why not using home manager?

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I had issues with Home Manager when desktop apps are concerned (e.g. OBS).

[@evjow]

Chezmoi is the best tool for the job

[@CelesteOnYoutube]

I need to try this one it looks interesting.

[@jhonyortiz5]

I use chezmoi. At first I really liked it. But having to use chezmoi edit for every file managed, or like I've done, auto check if a file is managed with a shell function, gets really old. Mainly because there are some clis that open the editor with their own arguments and options and you can't change them. For example, opening a file from yazi doesn't use my shell function that checks if the file is managed by chezmoi. Anyways, I love the tool but I also have come to dislike it to an extent.

[@julian7]

I try to stay away from stow. That has a dependency to perl, and I have a love-hate relationship with that language. I'd rather rely on bourne shell for an easy task like this one.

[@ammarshaneer8838]

Using symbolic links, Damn !!!

[@flybyray]

8:16 calling that … beautiful output … is just disturbing . I would guess only a human who hates IT would say that. Most often such disturbing changes will brake a lot if not understood how to use it carefully.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

That is eza which I happen to have as an alias to ls. I'm not sure what's disturbing about it.

[@XxNocturnxX]

I thought this was a nix video... disappointed :)