One trick I use is putting secrets in 1password and just including the 1password URLs in my checked in my sample dotfile.
Dotfiles feel too personal to share
21–30 of 153 posts
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#22I used to use chezmoi and had a great experience with it .It made it easy to choose exactly what I wanted to share. These days, I don’t have many devices, so I stopped using it. Still, it feels great when someone asks, “How did you set that up?” and I can instantly share my entire configuration through a GitHub repo.
I found the syncing process in chezmoi to be so hard to mentally model. I’d often change a file, forget that it was backed by the chezmoi store, later find myself trying to reconcile the differences, just so I could commit and share w/ another computer. nix + home-manager and snowfall lib, once over the multi month ramp up, have been such a breath of fresh air in multi system management
This command solve the problem for me: https://www.chezmoi.io/reference/commands/merge-all/
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#23I think the key is that dotfiles are a different genre of (code) writing than production code, with different investment, different motivations, different pain points and histories, and a sensitivity to the author that's not required when analyzing production code. You're looking into someone's daily writings, not their polished releases.
I think the fear is scrutiny, rejection, mockery for something that clearly works for you and you don't ever expect anyone else to use. But also partly that it's exposure without much reward in return. All these feelings are normal and it's fine to share or not share them. Just please honour the authors of the dotfiles you read even if you wouldn't ever think to use code in the way they do!
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#24I truly appreciate people sharing their dotfiles, I learned so much about vim and zsh just by reading other people's configuration alone (and the occasional comments there). Also, the quality of life improvements like `alias ..='cd ..'`, or mapping `l` such that it either opens a pager or lists a dir, depending on the argument. I'd never come up with those, and they're beyond useful.
Last one sounds interesting, could you share a link or snippet?
I imagine it's something like
l() { if [ -d "$1" ] ; then ls -alFh -- "$1" ; else "${PAGER:-pager}" -- "$1" ; fi }
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#25I've never felt that icky. I don't really have any secrets in my dotfiles, though I have in the past. In that case, I just encrypt the private stuff using my SSH private key (stored in 1password) and age (via sops-nix).
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#26My dots are open to anyone who cares to view my GitHub. I do tend to keep employer specific aliases/stuff in an `.employer.zsh` file that is sourced by my main `.zshrc`. But my NeoVim config is completely open for inspection. I'm not doing anything all that extraordinary though. I don't share my dots on Reddit simply because I don't feel like using my real identity on that platform. When it comes to consuming the dot…
Thanks for the reference, that looks incredible.
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#27They are private. Many people store env secrets (db conn strings, etc.) in .bashrc. It's meant to be a private place in your home folder for private things.
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#28I feel the same about my NixOS config despite the "open repo" model kind of being a default in that ecosystem
Oh man… that “how normal is this thing of mine” feeling writing nix gives me is such a weird characteristic of the ecosystem. I simultaneously don’t want anyone to see mine while desperately seeking affirmation that mine is not weird ^_^ Happy to hear I’m not alone!
It makes me feel bad because I frequently will search github with "language:nix" to find usages, which is usually done in someones (sometimes the nixpkgs commit authors) personal config :')
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#29Too personal to share, but maybe too personal and important to share even with the members of the cloudy cartel, i.e. the Providers. Is exactly why I wrote myba that does full contents and paths encryption before syncing with the lapsable remotes ...
Some things are better public. Some are not ...
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#30It's not a question of share everything or share nothing - with https://chezmoi.io you can choose exactly what you want to share:
* You can keep your entire dotfile repo secret by using any private git hosting, including your own git hosting or a private GitHub repo.
* You can keep individual files secret by using age or gpg encryption. If you repo is public, this only reveals the existence of the file, not its contents.
* You can keep individual parts of your dotfiles secrets, e.g. API keys, by encrypting them or storing them in your password manager. All popular password managers are supported.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of chezmoi.