My engineering environment as code managed by chezmoi.
My main computers are Mac's running either Intel or Apple Silicon. chezmoi is designed to configure the engineering part of my mac by installing all desktop and cli tools I need for coding, configuring my shell with colors and aliases as well as injecting credentials into some of the tools. It's not desinged to configure my Mac's in general, do basic settings and get productivity tools like a clipboard manager or a VPN client. This is still manual work.
For various side-usages chezmoi can also configure linux systems that are based on amd64 arch. There we skip all the desktop tools and don't inject any credentials since these linux systems are mostly remote systems where we don't want long-living credentials. If we need credentials, bring them along form your mac (agent-forwarding and the like).
Since the world isn't perfectly as code, some exceptions to my "as-code" workflow exist:
- VS Code Settings are synced via Github Settings Sync
chezmoi is the first and only tool I install manually using this command:
sh -c "$(curl -fsLS get.chezmoi.io)" -- -b /usr/local/bin init --apply the-technatA note for MacOS: before you can use chezmoi it will prompt you for the installation of XCode command line tools, do that and then rerun chezmoi
Tools are installed using homebrew. This has the benefit that updating the tools is as simple as running a brew upgrade and that I can also easily install desktop tools on Mac. I'm still a bit sceptical about the security of homebrew, but since it has almost 100% adoption in the Mac world, it's a no-brainer to still choose it.
Homebrew currently doesn't support arm64-based linux distros, but we can live with that.
My dotfiles setup git to use the github-cli for authentication against Github. On first use you need to sign-in using a device-code.
There is a script that generates a ssh-key on first run, tied to this host. The key is already setup in git for commit signing and for use with ssh. The only thing left is to add the key to your github account (or wherever you want to use it).