For the new gig, I have a bunch of ephemeral environments that I’ll be using regularly as well as my local machine, and I really want to have those environments feel like “home” in the sense of being easy to jump into and just start working, with all my usual tools available.

This is what dotfiles repos are for! Dotfiles are the files that usually start with a . (thus: dot files) in Unix-like systems in a user’s home directory, like ~/.profile, ~/.zshrc, ~/.config/fish/config.fish and so on. Building on this, a number of tools out there make it possible to use a repository as the source for your dotfiles — whether simply by symlinking their contents into your home directory, or by running a setup script that can do that for you — and, critically, can do that automatically every time an environment gets setup up. That makes setting up a new developer environment something automatable, and that’s great.

I have known about this approach for years, but I have never gotten around to doing it: Migration Assistant has Just Worked™ for a very long time for personal machines, and for work machines, copying over a couple config files has just not been a problem. But with a need to do this a lot, things look a bit different. I finally got enough motivation to solve this.

After poking around a bit, especially after reading through my friend Rob Jackson’s dotfiles and talking with him about his approach (thanks, Rob!) I decided to use mise-en-place (mise), which has a handy task runner system that “just” uses shell scripts on the file system… but that’s exactly what I want. It leaves me minimally coupled to mise as a tool: it’s just there to orchestrate a bunch of scripts and manage sequencing and dependencies for me.

Those are things I can do by hand, and that any other task-runner system could do as well. Using ` makes it very easy to let the tool do that coordination, though, while making every individual part of it easy to run (and therefore to test — albeit manually) in isolation.

So: my public dotfiles. They’re very much in flux right now as I determine exactly how I want to use them, and I expect to see them change quite a bit as I make much more ongoing use out of these ephemeral development environments in the months ahead. They are designed so that on any reasonably modern Unix-y machine (macOS or most Linux distros) with a Bash installation, checking out and running the install.sh script in the root will get everything up and running. That install script is very simple: it checks whether this is a “dry run” (to pass that on like mise run setup --dry-run), installs mise if it is not already installed, and then executes mise run setup.

Right now, those are very simple tasks to install Homebrew and install the packages I want and then set the default shell to fish. In the future, I expect to integrate actual dotfiles — particularly my fish and jj configs, as well as others for tools that I use less often but have customized over the years.

Hopefully this inspires a few of you to do the same with your own setups!