Chezmoi as a local git working tree management tool

[danpizz]

Hello there!

I've been using Chezmoi for a while to manage private or personal files in third party git repositories working trees. I'm talking about editors and IDEs configs, .env files, etc. that you'd like to have under source control but you cannot push to your team git repo.

I found Chezmoi as a great solution to this use case and I have not seen anything similar around, so I'm sharing my experience as a way to get some feedback and maybe give something useful to the Chezmoi community.

Scenario

I'm a programmer working with a team on my employer's git repo, "Project Apollo". Project Apollo is a very simple Python app:

apollo/
├── .git
└── source_file.py

In the local working tree of the Apollo repo on my workstation I have a couple of extra files that I need locally:

apollo/
├── .git
├── .vscode/
│   └── settings.json
├── my-local-config.py
└── source_file.py

The VSCode settings and the extra source is something I don't want to push on the Apollo repo, so what I usually do is adding those files to .gitignore or to .git/info/exclude.

But then I have to manually copy or update those files whenever I switch from my workstation to my notebook. It would be wonderful if I could save those files in a distinct git repository...

A git configuration management tool

Chezmoi can be used to create a kind of layered git working tree where some files belong to the main repo and some other files are managed by Chezmoi in the workspace repo.

I have been having good results with this layout:

workspace/
├── .git
├── bin/
│   └── chezmoi.sh
├── chezmoi/
│   ├── config/
│   │   └── config.toml
│   └── source/
│       ├── apollo/
│       │   ├── dot_git/
│       │   │   └── info/
│       │   │       └── exclude
│       │   └── dot_vscode/
│       │       └── settings.json
│       └── my-local-config.py
└── apollo/
    ├── .git/
    │   └── info/
    │       └── exclude
    ├── .vscode/
    │   └── settings.json
    ├── source_file.py
    └── my-local-config.py

where the workspace .gitignore is excluding the apollo dir:

/apollo

and apollo/.git/info/exclude excludes the files managed by chezmoi:

/.vscode
/my-local-config.py

This is the workspace/bin/chezmoi.sh script:

script_dir="$(dirname "$(realpath -- "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")")"
root_dir="$(realpath "${script_dir}/..")"

chezmoi \
    --config "${root_dir}/chezmoi/config/config.toml" \
    --source "${root_dir}/chezmoi/source" \
    --destination "${root_dir}" \
    --cache "${root_dir}/chezmoi/cache" \
    "$@"

I use chezmoi.sh to manage my personal files in the git dir in just the same way I manage my dotfiles.

Extra fancy stuff

• add the bin dir to your PATH and setup your virtual Python environment with direnv

• add how many repositories you need under workspace

  workspace/
  ├── .git
  ├── bin
  ├── chezmoi
  ├── apollo
  └── gemini
  

• add a postgres directory with its specific configuration for running Apollo locally

  workspace/
  ├── .git
  ├── bin
  ├── chezmoi
  ├── apollo
  ├── gemini
  └── postgres/
      ├── db
      ├── postgres.conf
      └── postgres-run.sh
  

As a freelance I found this to be a good way to compartimentize client code, data and stuff in a single git-backed directory.

[twpayne]

This is a really cool use of chezmoi, thank you for sharing!