I’ve been reading up on the concept of dotfile management, and I’ve come across tools such as GNU Stow, chezmoi, and yadm, but before I select a tool, I’d like to understand the workflow a little better.
I understand if the dotfiles are in some cloud provider such as GitHub, then after a fresh install one can do git clone etc, but let’s say one’s dotfiles are not stored in the cloud, then what’s the workflow for getting those dotfiles onto the freshly installed OS? Do people do git clone from another machine on their local network, manually copy the dotfiles folder from the source, use an app like LocalSend, or something else?
You can use Syncthing to, aptly, sync the files between machines and always have the latest copy everywhere — including your phone, if you so wish. On a new machine, you would probably ssh to another one and copy the files before having Syncthing properly installed (if you have apps setup automated).
Inside the dotfiles, I typically have separate configs between the machines, because they differ enough to have to be adjusted. But for me, it’s just separate Ansible playbooks and tasks in a common directory, which I lug around from one machine to another.