dotfiles

I now manage my dotfiles with vcsh and myrepos.

Prerequisites

In order for the steps below to work effectively, we need to have password-less authentication to our repository server set up.

Generate a new SSH key

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@example.com"

Adding an SSH key to your gitserver account

Windows

cd %userprofile%/.ssh
clip < id_rsa.pub

Linux

sudo apt install xclip
xclip -sel clip < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Then navigate to gitserver and go to "Add SSH key" under your profile and then paste the clipboard contents.

Starting the ssh-agent

In order to not have to enter the passphrase for your ssh-key each time (your ssh-key is passphrase protected right?), it is necessary to have the ssh-agent running in the background.

You can start this with:

eval $(ssh-agent -s)
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

vcsh

Locations

* [https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh]()
* [Manage Your Configs with vcsh](
   https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/manage-your-configs-vcsh)
* `~/.config/vcsh/`
    * This is where the vcsh repos live on each system.

Overview

The basic idea is to have different bare repositories for each application whose configuration you would like to manage and then to check these out into the home directory where the dotfiles need to live. However you also need to manage all the .gitignore files since repo needs to ignore the files of all the other repos.

vcsh simplifies all of this and then provides a git interface right in the $HOME directory.

Tutorial

The article Manage Your Configs with vcsh does a good job of introducing the vcsh and mr commands.

Installation

sudo apt install vcsh

Setup

When setting up a new vcsh repo to track for example vim files you do the following:

cd ~
vcsh init vim
vcsh vim add .vimrc
vcsh vim commit -m "Adds .vimrc file"
vcsh vim remote add origin git@gitserver:vim.git
vcsh vim push -u origin master

As you can see, the api is the same as git except that you use vcsh vim instead of git for each command.

Entering and exiting vcsh environments

If you are going to work with only one particular set of configuration files you can enter a vcsh environment akin to a python virtualenv or cona environment. You enter a vcsh environment with vcsh enter <environment name> and exit simply with exit. Using this the steps above would look as follows:

cd ~
vcsh init vim
vcsh enter vim
git add .vimrc
git commit -m "Adds .vimrc file"
git remote add origin git@gitserver:vcsh-vim.git
git push -u origin master
exit

Deploy your configuration to another machine

sudo apt install git vcsh

vcsh enter vim
git remote add origin git@gitserver:vcsh-vim.git
git pull -u origin master

or

vcsh clone git@gitserver:vcsh-vim.git vim

Cleaning up

In order to clean up any files installed on the system (for example if you want to deploy a fresh clean install), delete the following files and folders:

vcsh vim ls-files | xargs rm
rm -v -rf ~/.config/vcsh/repo.d/vim.git

Multiple vcsh repositiories

You can repeat the steps above for multiple repositories, for example for bash, git, vim, tmux, powerline, ...

This process works but becomes a bit tedious after a while. To automate this for multiple repos we use the next tool.

myrepos

* [https://github.com/RichiH/myrepos]()
* [https://myrepos.branchable.com/]()
* `~/.config/mr`
    * This is where the `mr` repo lives on each system.

Overview

The myrepos tool is available on Ubuntu through the mr command. It allows us to easily manage multiple vcsh repos and update them all at once.

Installation

sudo apt install mr

Setup

The easiest way to get started is to clone the repo template provided by the creator of vcsh and myrepos:

vcsh clone https://github.com/richih/vcsh_mr_template.git mr

The control files for mr live in ~/.config/mr/available.d so go to that directory and modify the files there:

cd ~/.config/mr/available.d
vim vim.vcsh

Once you've made your changes we need to commit them and push these to a new repo:

vcsh enter mr
cd ~/.config
git add mr
git commit -m "Adds mr configuration"
git remote rm origin
git remote add origin git@gitserver:vcsh-mr.git
git push -u origin master
exit

Deploying to a new machine

sudo apt install git vcsh mr
vcsh clone git@gitserver:vcsh-mr.git mr
mr up

vim requires a few extra steps. These are documented in ~/.vim/README.md but for ease of reference they are:

cd ~/.vim
git submodule init
git submodule update

That's it! Those lines are all that we need to all of our configurations deployed to a new machine.

Deploying on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Unfortunately there seems to be a bug with WSL implementation which breaks mr on wSL. I was however able to get it working with not too much additional effort:

for repo in bash git tmux vim; 
do
    vcsh clone git@gitserver:vcsh-$repo.git $repo
done

Cleaning up

In order to clean up any files installed on the system (for example if you want to deploy a fresh clean install), delete the following files and folders:

for repo in $(vcsh list);
do
    vcsh $repo ls-files | xargs rm
    rm -v -rf ~/.config/vcsh/repo.d/$repo.git
done
rm -v -rf ~/.config/mr
rm -v -rf ~/.gitignore.d/mr
rm -v -rf ~/.mrconfig

Windows

On Windows I use cmder as my terminal and then run xonsh (also https://xon.sh).

Installing xonsh

I use a Python 3.7 miniconda environment:

conda create -n py37 python=3.7
conda activate py37
conda install pygments prompt_toolkit win_unicode_console
pip install xonsh
pip install xontrib-powerline xontrib-prompt-vi-mode