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chezmoi Quick Start Guide

Concepts

chezmoi stores the desired state of your dotfiles in the directory ~/.local/share/chezmoi. When you run chezmoi apply, chezmoi calculates the desired contents and permissions for each dotfile and then makes any changes necessary so that your dotfiles match that state.

Start using chezmoi on your current machine

Initialize chezmoi:

chezmoi init

This will create a new git repository in ~/.local/share/chezmoi with permissions 0700 where chezmoi will store the source state. chezmoi only modifies files in the working copy. It is your responsibility to commit changes.

Manage an existing file with chezmoi:

chezmoi add ~/.bashrc

This will copy ~/.bashrc to ~/.local/share/chezmoi/dot_bashrc.

Edit the source state:

chezmoi edit ~/.bashrc

This will open ~/.local/share/chezmoi/dot_bashrc in your $EDITOR. Make some changes and save them.

See what changes chezmoi would make:

chezmoi diff

Apply the changes:

chezmoi -v apply

All chezmoi commands accept the -v (verbose) flag to print out exactly what changes they will make to the file system, and the -n (dry run) flag to not make any actual changes. The combination -n -v is very useful if you want to see exactly what changes would be made.

Finally, open a shell in the source directory, commit your changes, and return to where you were:

chezmoi cd
git add dot_bashrc
git commit -m "Add .bashrc"
exit

Using chezmoi across multiple machines

Clone the git repo in ~/.local/share/chezmoi to a hosted Git service, e.g. GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket. Many people call their dotfiles repo dotfiles. You can then setup chezmoi on a second machine:

chezmoi init https://github.com/username/dotfiles.git

This will check out the repo and any submodules and optionally create a chezmoi config file for you. It won't make any changes to your home directory until you run:

chezmoi apply

On any machine, you can pull and apply the latest changes from your repo with:

chezmoi update

Next steps

For a full list of commands run:

chezmoi help

chezmoi has much more functionality. Read the how-to guide to explore.