Using chezmoi "backwards"

[jbhanks]

I like the idea of Chezmoi, but I'm not sure the intended workflow will work for me.

It's problematic for me to edit my dotfiles exclusively through Chezmoi for several reasions:

• Sometimes I edit settings within apps. That changes the dotfiles without Chezmoi knowing (right?).
• I know I will accidentally modify some dotfiles directly from force of habit.

I'm thinking it might make most sense for me to just have a startup script that runs chezmoi apply and push to git at each login. If I understand correctly how chezmoi re-add works, this will ensure that all the files being tracked by Chezmoi will be backed up (and secrets removed) at least to the last login. As long as I am ok with that limitation, I can do this and ignore chezmoi edit, is that correct?

Apologies if this makes the devs cringe.

*Edited because I mixed up apply and add.

[bradenhilton]

It's problematic for me to edit my dotfiles exclusively through Chezmoi

You don't have to edit your dotfiles exclusively through chezmoi. I never use chezmoi edit. I open my source directory in VS Code and edit them there, then run chezmoi diff/chezmoi apply etc.

• Sometimes I edit settings within apps. That changes the dotfiles without Chezmoi knowing (right?).

See Handle configuration files which are externally modified for a symlink approach and Modify file for a brief overview on modify_* scripts and modify_* templates which can also help with this.

• I know I will accidentally modify some dotfiles directly from force of habit.

You can probably use chezmoi re-add/chezmoi merge/chezmoi merge-all for this, but I'm not sure as it's not part of my workflow.

[halostatue]

I use chezmoi merge and chezmoi merge-all because I rarely edit my chezmoi files directly; I never use chezmoi re-add (I don't think it's as safe as a merge operation and it doesn't work with templates, which a fairly large number of my configuration files are).

@jbhanks if you continue to edit your files outside of chezmoi directly, you should get used to running one or both of chezmoi diff or chezmoi merge-all before running chezmoi apply.

[jbhanks]

Ok knowing that it doesn't work with templates helps. My goal was to get the templates while having my main dotfiles directory being the core source of truth, and auto-generate new templates on each login. Maybe something like this would do what I want?

if command -v chezmoi &>/dev/null; then
  chezmoi merge-all
  chezmoi apply
  cd "$(chezmoi source-path)" && \
    git add . && \
    git diff --quiet || \
    git commit -m "Auto backup: $(date --iso-8601=seconds)" && \
    git push
fi
``

[Lockszmith-GH]

chezmoi apply - applies the source-state (/.local/share/chezmoi) to your work-state (/).
git push - pushes whatever changes are in your source-state into your remote git repo (origin)

These are in two opposite directions, and the result will be your work-state overwritten.

I'm guessing what you were looking for was merge, like halostatue mentioned previously.
But I'm unsure why you would want to place it in your login flow (remote git operation can be slow).

May I suggest the following flow:

1. Your work configuration changes
2. You identify that you want to preserve this change
3. You 'save' your changes <--- this is the point where you will run your script.

At #3 you can script the merge, git add, git commit, git push process - this will be what works for you.

When you want to sync your changes from other places, what you're probably looking for is:
chezmoi update - which does: git pull followed by git apply

If there are any conflicts, chezmoi will prompt you and allow you to diff before, you can run your save script first and then cz apply

[twpayne]

chezmoi already supports automatically committing and pushing changes.

It also has gitleaks built in, and will warn you if you chezmoi add a file that looks like it has a secret in it. You can set add.secrets to error to get an error instead, which is wise if you're using auto push.

[jbhanks]

Yeah, like I said in the OP, I love the features and integration that Chezmoi offers. I just want to do it with the opposite workflow as intended. Make whatever changes I want, by whatever means I want (including GUIs), in my home directory, then auto-generate secret-redacted templates from the in-use dotfiles and put those templates in a git repository. Perhaps there are pitfalls to this approach that I am not thinking of.

[Lockszmith-GH]

Thanks @twpayne!

As for your concern, @jbhanks, I had similar concerns at first, way before cz became part of my habits
My solution was to track whether there are changes in my prompt (I use starship these days, it was oh-my-zsh back then).

Basically a chezmoi status | wc -l counter.

If you encounter any performance issue - see this old discussion #2375

[jbhanks]

That helps, but the issue isn't just being aware of them, it's that I don't want to bother with manually diffing changes made to my active dotfiles. If I can treat my dotfiles in $HOME the same as I always have and just trust the auto-merging, I don't understand why that wouldn't work. As long as I know that I always want to overwrite the repo with my active dotfile (always removing secrets), that should be scriptable, right?

[Lockszmith-GH]

Take a look at chezmoi edit --apply --interactive <path>

This will:

1. open the file for editing from chezmoi source-path, if it's the template - you edit the template
2. When you exit, it will prompt you whether to apply to your work dir (if you remove the --interactive, no prompt)

if you alias that command, tied with the auto commit feature tom mentioned, you should have what you are looking for.

I have something similar, where my editor command actually triggers a script which checked whether the path I'm editing is a managed one, and if it is, it does a chezmoi edit... on the path instead of opening the editor directly.

[sabamimi]

Hello @jbhanks ,
Did you find a good solution for your process?
I am in the same situation and i did not find a good way:

• The merge-all way open, in my case, an interactive window for every diff and that is not viable (like you I would like my changes to be pushed to chezmoi dir and then to the git automatically)
• The re-add way seems to skip some changes (at least in my case)

Still trying to find a way ...