My Personal Public DOTfiles managed by chezmoi

This public Github repository has been built for my own benefit, however, feel free to sneak in and steal anything that would improve your own productivity. My plans rely on maintaining a CI workflow alongside GitHub Actions to ensure that my changes will not break across different OS flavours. The current smoke-test matrix covers the following Linux flavours:

• AlmaLinux 9
• AlmaLinux 10
• Ubuntu 24.04
• Ubuntu 25.10

macOS is verified separately on a GitHub-hosted macOS runner by rendering and applying the repo into a temporary home directory.

Installation instructions

I'd not care of using GitHub for backing up my dotfiles if my perspectives of using them remained in a single machine. You can install this repo via a Convenient script or manually in its defect.

Convenience script

If chezmoi is not installed yet, run the standalone install script directly.

# Using Curl
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kitos9112/dotfiles/master/install)"

# OR Using Wget
sh -c "$(wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kitos9112/dotfiles/master/install)"

Manually with git

Clone the repo and execute the install script from its root directory.

Manually with chezmoi

Leveraging off-the-shelf Chezmoi capabilities

chezmoi init --apply --verbose https://github.com/kitos9112/dotfiles.git

Local Chezmoi Data

Machine-specific values should live in local chezmoi config, not in the public repo. This repo already reads data from ~/.config/chezmoi/chezmoi.toml.

For Git identity, the default profile uses personal_name and personal_email when present. If is_work = true and work_email is set, the machine-wide default becomes the work identity. A work-only Git profile is also available via work_gitdir for path-based overrides.

Example:

[data]
  personal_name = "Marcos Soutullo"
  personal_email = "personal@example.com"

  work_name = "Marcos Soutullo"
  work_email = "work@example.com"
  work_gitdir = "~/workspace/company/"

With that configuration:

• ~/.gitconfig uses your personal identity by default, or your work identity when is_work = true.
• ~/.gitconfig-work is rendered automatically.
• Git switches to the work identity only for repositories under work_gitdir.

Existing installations should add those keys to ~/.config/chezmoi/chezmoi.toml and then run chezmoi apply.

Verification

CI currently does two different checks:

• Linux container smoke tests build the Dockerfiles under tests/ and run the standalone installer in DOTFILES_TEST=true mode.
• macOS smoke tests run chezmoi init --apply and chezmoi verify against a temporary home directory while excluding scripts.

To reproduce the macOS-style verification locally:

tmp_home="$(mktemp -d)"
HOME="${tmp_home}" \
XDG_CONFIG_HOME="${tmp_home}/.config" \
XDG_DATA_HOME="${tmp_home}/.local/share" \
XDG_STATE_HOME="${tmp_home}/.local/state" \
XDG_CACHE_HOME="${tmp_home}/.cache" \
DOTFILES_TEST=true chezmoi init --apply --source "$(pwd)" --exclude scripts --no-tty

Portable VS Code

If the portable Linux tarball is installed at ~/.apps/vscode, chezmoi now manages the VS Code launcher directly as code:

• ~/.local/share/applications/code.desktop
• ~/.local/share/applications/vscode-portable.desktop
• ~/Desktop/Visual Studio Code.desktop

The desktop entries prefer a managed local icon named vscode-portable, and a hidden code.desktop alias helps GNOME/Ubuntu match the running VS Code window to the portable launcher.

If ~/.apps/vscode was previously added to chezmoi source state by mistake, remove it once with:

chezmoi forget --force ~/.apps/vscode

Chezmoi scripts

Chezmoi uses general-purpose scripts to execute ordered operations in the system. They can run either:

• Every time you run chezmoi apply (run scripts)
• When their contents change (run_once or run_onchange scripts)

Application order

Scripts are found in its own directory to avoid being copied over to the target system.

Security considerations

Having a local .git (A.K.A. submodule) folder inside your dotfiles could become dangerous as you're naturally exposing (or unconsciously prompted to) your git history and very specific local configuration. Not even to mention the burden it sometimes signifies.

As I just feed myself from the great works other peers conduct in the wild Internet (e.g. Oh-my-zsh), I'm a mere consumer of their work who clones their source code and thereby uses it.

My scsripts/00_run_once/run_once_100-extras.zsh.tmpl takes care of cloning/pulling(--rebase) their public GitHub repos.