Migrating a pre-existing dotfiles repository

[britter]

Hi,

I've been managing my dotfiles in a repository for years now, using a link script. So I have for example a .bashrc file in that repository, and then I clone the repository and link the file into my user home. I'm now considering migrating to chezmoi, but I want to keep the history of the repository and the history of the individual files. I wonder what the best process for doing that is and if there are any gotchas that I need to be aware of. Here's what I'm thinking of doing:

• Install chezmoi
• Clone my dotfiles repository to ~/.local/share/chezmoi
• Rename files and dirs starting with a . to dot_
• Run chezmoi diff to see what would happen
• When satisfied run chezmoi apply
• Commit and push changes

Does this make sense? Anything else I need to initialize in the chezmoi repository that would normally be initialized by chezmoi init?

Thank you!

[garyo]

I came here just now to write exactly this! Interested to hear what the best practices are for migrating a long-existing dotfiles repo.

[twpayne]

Does this make sense?

Yes, your proposed series of steps sound very reasonable. git should detect the renames and so you'll maintain per-file history.

Anything else I need to initialize in the chezmoi repository that would normally be initialized by chezmoi init?

No, nothing else is needed. chezmoi init just creates an empty git repo.

Another approach that you might want to consider if you want to do an incremental migration is to use .chezmoiroot and chezmoi add --follow. .chezmoiroot allows you to keep the chezmoi-managed files separate from your link-script managed files (in your case this only matters for the licenses directory and README.md as chezmoi ignores everything beginning with a .). chezmoi add --follow tells chezmoi to add the targets of symlinks, rather than adding the symlink itself.

Together this means you'd do something like:

$ git clone https://github.com/britter/dotfiles.git ~/.local/share/chezmoi
$ chezmoi cd
$ mkdir home
$ echo home > .chezmoiroot
$ chezmoi add --follow ~/.bashrc
$ rm .bashrc

...and similarly run chezmoi add --follow ~/$FILE && rm $FILE for the other dotfiles you want to chezmoi to manage.

This has the following advantages:

• The migration can be incremental.
• chezmoi add will pick up any extra attributes of the dotfile (e.g. if it's executable).
• At the end, you'll end up with your dotfiles in the home subdirectory in your dotfiles repo, so the root of your dotfiles repo will be uncluttered.

Hope this helps - please do follow up with any questions.

[britter]

I will give this a try. Thank you so much!

[bvdwalt]

This even helped me today. Thank you for the steps.

[garyo]

Thanks! I ended up just doing chezmoi init and then adding my existing repo as an upstream and pulling it all in. (Just in case chezmoi was going to populate the repo with anything like a .gitignore or anything else). That worked fine. But since chezmoi init creates an empty repo, your method above would be simpler.