Skip to main content

Dotfiles in a Workspace

Personalizing a Workspace​

You can personalize your workspace environment by using a dotfiles repository.

Dotfiles are plain text configuration files on Unix like systems (e.g. MacOS, Linux, BSD). Dotfiles store settings of almost every application, service and tool running on your system. It is common practice to track dotfiles with a version control system such as Git to keep track of changes and synchronize dotfiles across various hosts.

You can use the --dotfiles flag when creating a workspace, so that Devsy will automatically clone and install your dotfiles in the workspace.

If you only specify the dotfiles repo, Devsy will clone your selected dotfiles repository into the workspace, and will look into one of these locations to find a script to setup the environment.

  • install.sh
  • install
  • bootstrap.sh
  • bootstrap
  • script/bootstrap
  • setup.sh
  • setup
  • script/setup

If none of the previous location are found, Devsy will just link every hidden file (files starting with .) in the $HOME directory of the container.

It is possible to specify custom install script locations for your special setup. If a custom install script is specified, Devsy will directly run that one instead.

Via Devsy CLI​

Run the following command to a workspace with a dotfiles repo:

devsy up https://github.com/example/repo --dotfiles https://github.com/my-user/my-dotfiles-repo

Specifying a custom install script:

devsy up https://github.com/example/repo --dotfiles https://github.com/my-user/my-dotfiles-repo --dotfiles-script custom/location/install.sh

For all Workspaces​

You can setup these options on a context wide scope so that you won't have to specify dotfiles ad dotfiles-script for each single workspace:

Example with a real repository:

devsy context set-options -o DOTFILES_URL=https://github.com/89luca89/dotfiles -o DOTFILES_SCRIPT=bin/.local/bin/dotfiles

All new Workspaces will be created with that dotfile repository and install script.