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Using chezmoi to manage dotfiles

8 min read

There are many options available to manage dotfiles. I have been using chezmoi for a while now and I am quite happy with it. In this post I will explain how I have set up chezmoi to manage my dotfiles.

I have tried several different approaches, including doing nothing - basically just making sure I had a backup somewhere. I’ve also tried a simple shell script that would manage symlinks for me. I’ve also tried GNU Stow. There are several reasons I don’t like stow but this post isn’t about bashing stow. I started to look into Nix HomeManager but I didn’t want to go all in on Nix. Nix seemed to all invasive and “heavyweight”. So what are my requirements?

Requirements

Must-haves

My requirements are quite simple:

  • CLI - there must be a command line interface
  • cross-platform - I want to be able to use the same tool on Linux, macOS and Windows
  • free and open source
  • version control integration - I want to have the history of my dotfiles
  • rollback - I want to be able to rollback changes
  • sync - I want to be able to sync my dotfiles across multiple machines

Nice to haves

  • secret management - it would be nice to have sensitive values encrypted

Chezmoi

I’m not sure how I first heard of chezmoi. I probably read some blog or saw a video on YouTube. At the time I was managing dotfiles with my own shell script. I was manually saving to GitHub. This met my “must-have” requirements, but obviously it was less than ideal since it was manual. Chezmoi seemed to meet all my requirements including the nice-to-haves. I decided to give it a try.

Download and install

Chezmoi supports various Linux distros and MacOS and Windows. The download instructions give all the details. I use brew even on Linux so I installed chezmoi with brew install chezmoi.

The chezmoi CLI is called … chezmoi. Surprise! You can verify that it is installed and in your path by checking the version:

$ chezmoi --version
chezmoi version v2.57.0, commit 9212b40bac1186ff393da8714579cfdc4816cc20, built at 2024-12-30T15:06:18Z, built by goreleaser

Initial setup

With chezmoi installed, the next step is to initialize chezmoi. This is done with the chezmoi init command. This creates a directory $HOME/.local/share/chezmoi and initializes it as a Git repo. The chezmoi cd command creates a new shell and changes to that chezmoi directory. This is where chezmoi will manage your configuration.

ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi init
ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi cd
ray@kidoni:~$ pwd
/home/ray/.local/share/chezmoi
ray@kidoni:~$ ls -a
.  ..  .git

You are now ready to add whatever config you want to manage with chezmoi.

An aside on the "architecture" of chezmoi.

Chezmoi has a source state and a target state. The source state is the content stored in ~/.local/share/chezmoi while the target state is the content in your filesystem where the “real” files are. The source and target state can be out of sync for various reasons, some good and some not so good. You may legitimately want to have different content as you work on some config changes before you want your changes to take effect. You may also have made changes to the target because you forgot to use the chezmoi edit command (see below) and just edited the target file directly. If you do forget to use the chezmoi edit command, you can use the chezmoi re-add command to update the source state with the target state.

Adding configuration

To add a file to chezmoi use the chezmoi add command. This will create a copy of the file in the chezmoi directory, creating any necessary directories and if the file is literally a dotfile (i.e. it starts with a ’.’) it will be renamed to start with the word ‘dot’. For example,

ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi add .bashrc
ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi cd
ray@kidoni:~/.local/share/chezmoi$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ray ray 3771 Jan  9 11:48 dot_bashrc

Let’s add a few more files. If including files in a subdirectory, you can just give the subdirectory and it will recurse and add all the files. Be careful though because this will include any dotfiles in the directory, including a .git directory for example.

ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi add .config/nvim

There are many options to the add command which you can see with chezmoi add --help, such as to be prompted for each file it will add, or whether to follow symlinks.

To see what files are under chezmoi’s control use the chezmoi managed command.

ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi managed
.bashrc
.config
.config/nvim
.config/nvim/init.lua
.config/nvim/lua
.config/nvim/lua/custom
.config/nvim/lua/custom/plugins
.config/nvim/lua/custom/plugins/init.lua
.config/nvim/lua/kickstart
.config/nvim/lua/kickstart/health.lua
.config/nvim/lua/kickstart/plugins
.config/nvim/lua/kickstart/plugins/autopairs.lua
.config/nvim/lua/kickstart/plugins/debug.lua
.config/nvim/lua/kickstart/plugins/gitsigns.lua
.config/nvim/lua/kickstart/plugins/indent_line.lua
.config/nvim/lua/kickstart/plugins/lint.lua
.config/nvim/lua/kickstart/plugins/neo-tree.lua

Integrating with remote Git repo

As mentioned, chezmoi initializes the chezmoi directory as a Git repo. If you want to point that to a remote such as GitHub, use standard Git commands. For example, go to your GitHub and create a repo called dotfiles (or whatever) and then add that as a remote to chezmoi and push …

ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi cd
ray@kidoni:~$ git remote add origin https://github.com/<youruser>/dotfiles.git
ray@kidoni:~$ git push -u origin main

Correction

In the original version of this post I said that there was a builtin chezmoi command ‘push’ (e.g. chezmoi push) to push git changes to your remote. This was incorrect. I had an alias for that: alias cpush='chezmoi git push' which made me think there was a chezmoi push.

You do not need to be in the chezmoi directory to use Git commands. You can use chezmoi git to execute git commands as if you were in the chezmoi directory:

ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi git log
commit 3a69491e882710e646a7ca074488abe4b9058b39 (HEAD -> master)
Author: Example Dev <example@example.dev>
Date:   Fri Jan 17 14:26:08 2025 -0800
 
    Update .config/starship.toml
 
commit 040eb1293c1d8a983f2b8c76ba0f3c82d06924b3
Author: Example Dev <example@example.dev>
Date:   Fri Jan 17 14:25:52 2025 -0800
 
    Update .bashrc
    Add .config/starship.toml
    Add .gitconfig
 
commit dc461350919b6f74e3c524bde713e85cf14bb5bf
Author: Example Dev <example@example.dev>
Date:   Fri Jan 17 14:14:26 2025 -0800
 
    initial commit

Initializing from Git

Once you have your configuration in GitHub or whichever service you use, you can then initialize chezmoi on a new machine using the chezmoi init command and providing the Git URL of your repository e.g.

ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi init https://github.com/<youruser>/dotfiles.git

Updating your dotfiles

Configuration is rarely static. When you want to update some configuration file, you use the chezmoi edit command. This will open the file in your default editor. Changes made are only in the source state. The target(s) have not been updated. When you are ready to update the target state, you use the chezmoi apply command. If you don’t remember what needs to be applied or generally what the state is of your configuration, you can use the chezmoi status command. This will list files that are out of sync. You can also use the chezmoi diff command which will display the changes of one or all of your configuration files.

ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi status
ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi edit .bashrc
ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi status
 M .bashrc
ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi diff
diff --git a/.bashrc b/.bashrc
index b488fcc4cee656840d7a756298456eaa243b3e46..991c9ce851dd7a344ca769ba7f19c331a2dacf08 100664
--- a/.bashrc
+++ b/.bashrc
@@ -89,8 +89,8 @@ #export GCC_COLORS='error=01;31:warning=01;35:note=01;36:caret=01;32:locus=01:quote=01'
 
 # some more ls aliases
 alias ll='ls -alF'
-alias la='ls -A'
-alias l='ls -CF'
+alias la='ls -a'
+alias l='ls -Cl'
 
 # Add an "alert" alias for long running commands.  Use like so:
 #   sleep 10; alert
ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi apply
ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi status
ray@kidoni:~$

You can do this manually to see what chezmoi is doing under the hood:

ray@kidoni:~$ chezmoi edit .bashrc
ray@kidoni:~$ diff -c ~/.local/share/chezmoi/dot_bashrc ~/.bashrc
*** /home/ray/.local/share/chezmoi/dot_bashrc   2025-01-09 12:44:10.038292369 -0800
--- /home/ray/.bashrc   2025-01-09 12:39:54.584544373 -0800
***************
*** 92,101 ****
  alias la='ls -a'
  alias l='ls -Cl'
 
- alias ce='chezmoi edit'
- alias ca='chezmoi apply'
- alias cs='chezmoi status'
-
  # Add an "alert" alias for long running commands.  Use like so:
  #   sleep 10; alert
--- 92,97 ----

Configuration and nvim integration

Chezmoi configuration

The chezmoi configuration file is in ~/.config/chezmoi/chezmoi.toml. You can edit the file directly but chezmoi provides a command to view and a command to edit the configuration, chezmoi cat-config and chezmoi edit-config respectively. The main benefit of using these commands in not having to remember where the configuration file is located, or type the full path. You can see the documentation for the configuration file for the various options. Some I find useful include automatically pushing to Git after applying changes and customizing the diff:

[diff]
    command = "delta"
    pager = "delta"
 
[git]
    autoCommit = true

Neovim integration

There are a few plugins to integrate chezmoi with nvim. The one I use is xvzc/chezmoi.vim by virtue of using LazyVim, which comes with support for chezmoi as one of its [“extra” plugins] (https://www.lazyvim.org/extras/util/chezmoi). There are some nice things with this plugin, such as searching the chezmoi-managed configuration using Telescope (<leader>sz by default). You can also configure nvim to automatically treat files in the chezmoi directory as chezmoi files.

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd({ "BufRead", "BufNewFile" }, {
    pattern = { os.getenv("HOME") .. "/.local/share/chezmoi/*" },
    callback = function(ev)
        local bufnr = ev.buf
        local edit_watch = function()
            require("chezmoi.commands.__edit").watch(bufnr)
        end
        vim.schedule(edit_watch)
    end,
})

Coming next

I’ve just covered some of the basics here. There many more intermediate and advanced things you can do with chezmoi, such as encoding secrets, integrating with password managers and templating. There are also script hooks you can write, for example to install some binary or package before or after some config is modified. I’ll cover some of these in a future post.

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