It takes a lot of discipline to keep secretes out of dotfiles. You should do that anyway, even if you have a private dotfile repo. Even if they aren't secrets per se - they can still be useful for social engineering. I don't understand why people think their configs are so special it is worth the risk.
Dotfiles feel too personal to share
81–90 of 153 posts
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly just can't vibe with the "don't customize because you'll log into other servers" thing. To me it feels like getting told to not put nice shelves in my home because other buildings don't have them.
Here you go # Roaming bashrc profile function sshrc() { BASHRC=$(cat ${HOME}/.bashrc_roaming | base64 -w 0) ssh -t $@ "echo \"${BASHRC}\" | base64 --decode > ~/.bashrc_roaming; \ bash --rcfile ~/.bashrc_roaming; \ rm ~/.bashrc_roaming"; }
I was thinking of exactly that. Or maybe, for an extreme version of this, one could create a Docker image with the whole dev environment, start the container at the login, bind mount / of the host somewhere and work from there. Then Ctrl-D and it's gone.
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#83I feel similarly. For me it’s less about my unique customizations and more about this paranoia of there being something remotely sensitive in my ssh configs or something… the idea of hostnames, ips, domains, etc “leaking” worries me. I use chezmoi to manage my dotfiles, if anyone has any advice on how to handle these worries I am all ears. I would love to share mine, even to just be able to point coworkers at my conf…
chezmoi includes secret scanning from https://gitleaks.io/ by default to catch when you accidentally add a file with a secret in it. To be even more confident, you should add gitleaks as a git hook to your repo however.
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#84is there some sort of utility to automatically backup and retrieve dotfiles from github to keep different computers synchronized?
Well, there is cron and git. I don't see why you need anything else.
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#85The 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 rel…
Not just the internet but communities too. High trust societies are great to live in, digitally and physically. Leave the doors unlocked, leave keys in the ignition, leave valuables on the table when you walk away. But high trust societies only work when the price of ongoing admission is not violating that trust. When you accept/tolerate/expect the violation of trust the doors lock.
... but dude, we're talking about how you configure VI and ... bash. Like... guys. Calm down.
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#86Installing a (read: many) custom vim plugins and color scheme and screen version and etc… stops being fun about the third time you have to log into a nameless server. That being said, there are some settings that I absolutely cannot live without; `j=gj` being a good example in vim. IMO your dot files are only useful to share if they are usable with the default software of the place you’ve shared them to. Otherwise th…
dotfiles are pretty easy to move to a new server, no?
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It completely depends on your work environment. My experience has been doing a lot of admin work and working with distributed databases. I probably spend a third of my day in servers that are not mine. So for me it just doesn’t make sense to make a lot of configuration changes, especially changes that will end up in my muscle memory. Now my personal computer does have much nicer color schemes and a few plugins for co…
Seems like a great opportunity to learn a bit about automating this set up. Really not hard to upload a .vim directory on a remote server for example.
The better place to spend time might be the automation of operational tasks on those servers so that logging in isn’t necessary in the first place. Then you don’t have to leave your home environment and you can run whatever custom editing configuration you want. Of course the other upsides to that automation overshadow this a bit.
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like a great opportunity to learn a bit about automating this set up. Really not hard to upload a .vim directory on a remote server for example.
Nah. Other people need to use them too. You just don't do that kind of stuff managing a fleet of servers. Keep it standard. Automation is yet another thing to manage and maintain. I keep all of my servers completely standard.
> Automation is yet another thing to manage and maintain
But supposedly you already have an automation that you maintain your standard servers with. Adding an Ansible role that puts .vimrc into $HOME surely isn't that much of a maintenance burden?
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah. Other people need to use them too. You just don't do that kind of stuff managing a fleet of servers. Keep it standard. Automation is yet another thing to manage and maintain. I keep all of my servers completely standard.
Surely you can put your own dotfiles into your own account on that machine, though, without impacting other people?
Not when everyone logs in as ec2-user.
Re: Dotfiles feel too personal to share
#90Installing a (read: many) custom vim plugins and color scheme and screen version and etc… stops being fun about the third time you have to log into a nameless server. That being said, there are some settings that I absolutely cannot live without; `j=gj` being a good example in vim. IMO your dot files are only useful to share if they are usable with the default software of the place you’ve shared them to. Otherwise th…
I honestly just can't vibe with the "don't customize because you'll log into other servers" thing. To me it feels like getting told to not put nice shelves in my home because other buildings don't have them.
it's going to depend on whether you're a software dev or a sre/ops person.