Dotfiles feel too personal to share • Hacker News Board

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#31

Post by alisonatwork » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

The first UNIX account I ever got was on a BSD, and the first thing I saw in the first file I learned how to open was:

  # A righteous umask
  umask 22

I'll never forget those lines because they seemed so mysterious and cool. And they informed my philosophy on how the internet should be. People should be able to see other people's stuff by default. It's nice for us to be able to learn from one another. It's harder to rely on the honor system for privacy nowadays, but I still think "share by default" is a noble ideal.

That said, I also am unsure how best to overlap aliases and configs that are sensitive to my workplace with my everywhere config. Maybe I should have a .employer file that I source if it's there, but something about including that into my everywhere config feels decidedly not righteous.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#32

Post by Cu3PO42 » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

My dotfiles are public [0], but getting there was work. I went through everyhing to make sure I don't accidentally leak something, all secrets are managed separately, you don't accidentally distribute something violating its licence, etc.

I also feel the need to write docs for some things, that I never would if they were private (I haven't actually done that, I just feel that I should).

I get everyone who wants to keep them private, but I'm also thankful for everyone who made them public so others can learn from them.

[0] github.com/Cu3PO42/gleaming-glacier/tree/next

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#33

Post by tecleandor » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

kernc wrote: post #29

Too 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 ... https://kernc.github.io/myba/ Some things are better public. Some are not ...

That looks nice!

The moment I started syncing dotfiles between my work and personal computers, I know it was an error because very different reasons. Difficulty of maintaining different OS details (Linux vs MacOS). What if leaked a private key or a sensible path. What if a pushed to the wrong place or somebody made public the wrong repository...

When reading your comment something and idea came to mind about using something like sops to encrypt paths, passwords and keys. But I'll check yours first, so to avoid to construct a bunch of stuff that you've already done :D

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#34

Post by tecleandor » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

twp wrote: post #30

It'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 conte…

I used chezmoi briefly yeeeeeears ago, and I think it didn't have the 'encrypt only parts of the files' feature yet. I might test it again :)

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#35

Post by kjuulh » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

twp wrote: post #30

It'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 conte…

Chezmoi has been a blessing to use. It is one of the only tools I've used that had been able to survive me neclecting it for months and then getting back to it. I'd love a more interactive diff when my dotfiles have driften too much. But otherwise it is perfect for my needs.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#36

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:04 PM UTC

qiine wrote: post #16

I was close to upload my full dotfile dir to github, telling myself it would be handy when I switch computers.. Then I realized that some of those config files reflected a lot about my systems and personal preferences... and it was only going to be ever more detailed, so I said NOPE making separate repos for my nvim config maybe and that will be it! sorry.

You can always use a private repository for it. And, yeah, it's been very useful. I pushed a relatively straight forward config for Windows and WSL a few years ago, I really need to update it. I also want to get my Linux config done as well.

I mostly backup and restore from my NAS for my dot-files, and some of my ~/.config, though I need to nail that down a bit better, as ~/.config feels excessively bloated from a few apps.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#37

Post by gchamonlive » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

You just have to put some effort into separating your dotfiles into a generic layer and a customization layer. Done something like this with my dotfiles repo, which now triples as a generic archlinux customisation tutorial with hyprland and a description of the backup strategy that is tightly coupled with the configuration layout: https://github.com/gchamon/archlinux-system-config

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#38

Post by nativeit » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

seethishat wrote: post #27

They 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.

Aren’t the default permissions 644?

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#39

Post by k_roy » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

seethishat wrote: post #27

They 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.

They are really only private if you design it that way. There are numerous ways you could have access to those private parts of your bashrc, but still make the actual bashrc public.

That's coming from my kubernetes background though, and handling secrets this way is not something that people are always accustomed to.

Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share

#40

Post by Insanity » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 4:10 PM UTC

I actually resonate with this as well, but similarly can't really explain why. I have my own set of dotfiles (one set for my 'home setup' and one set for my 'work setup').

They are versioned and stored on GitHub, and are actually relatively static at this point. And even though it's pretty standard stuff, I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing them publicly. Odd.