My own dotfiles 🏡

How I store my dotfiles and automate the setup. The setup is based on stow to manage the configuation files and simple bash scripts to automate the setup.

Bootstrap

To setup these dotfiles, there are two options:

1. Using a the convenience script init.sh. This is fully automatic, but requires either wget or curl.
2. Manually cloning the repo.

Option 1: init.sh script

If curl is available run

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pbignardi/dotfiles/refs/heads/main/init.sh | bash

If wget is available run

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pbignardi/dotfiles/refs/heads/main/init.sh | bash

Option 2: Clone repo

If git is already installed, clone the repository and run the bootstrap.sh script with bash.

git clone https://github.com/pbignardi/dotfiles $HOME/dotfiles
cd dotfiles
bash bootstrap.sh

What does bootstrap.sh do?

The bootstrap.sh script, performs some basic setup, to automate some of the configuration steps that are required on each system. Dotfiles are assumed to be stored in the ~/dotfiles directory, and each program has its own Stow package.

The bootstrap.sh script performs the following actions:

• Preliminary steps
• For each system, configure the package manager and install the required packages
  • On Arch, run packages/pacman.sh
  • On Mac, run packages/brew.sh
  • On Debian/Ubuntu, run packages/apt.sh
  • On Fedora, run packages/dnf.sh
  • On desktop linux, run packages/flatpak.sh
  • On Windows, run packages/winget.sh
• Install Bitwarden password manager (CLI).
• TODO: Install uv
• Install oh-my-posh
• Change shell to ZSH
• Copy public SSH keys from the Bitwarden vault if variable USE_SECRETS is true.
• Set SSH remote to dotfiles repo.
• Pull dotfiles from Github
• Delete files that conflicts with stow packages
• stow dotfiles.
• TODO: copy Windows config files

Why not using a dotfile manager? Well there are some good ones, but I feel like they are mostly overkill for what I actually need. After having tried chezmoi I figured it was probably easier to maintain a simple script with all the steps I need to perform to setup a new computer with the software and configuration I need.

Extra: setup Archlinux WSL

Thankfullly there is a way to use Linux on Windows, using WSL. Below I report some instructions on how to setup Archlinux on WSL, as instructed on the ArchWiki.

Installation is straightforward using

wsl --install archlinux

Afterwards, install sudo, sed and create a user to avoid having to use root.

pacman -Syu sudo vi
useradd -m -G wheel -s /bin/bash USERNAME

Allow the wheel group to use sudo

visudo

Modify /etc/wsl.conf and add

[user]
default=USERNAME

Finally exit WSL and terminate it:

wsl --terminate archlinux