dotfiles

My personal dotfiles. Managed by yadm, used on both native Ubuntu and WSL2 machines.

Quick start (new machine)

# Install yadm
sudo apt install yadm

# Clone and bootstrap
yadm clone <your-repo-url>
yadm bootstrap

The bootstrap script installs Ansible if needed, then runs ~/.config/ansible/setup.yml to set up the machine. It will prompt for your sudo password.

What's included

Shell (.bashrc)

The .bashrc is organized around a bash_main function that runs all setup, then cleans up helper functions afterward. Key features:

• Logging — sources ~/.bashlog if present; all sections call bashlog for tracing (useful when debugging shell startup). If .bashlog is missing, bashlog becomes a no-op.

• pathprepend — helper to add directories to $PATH without duplicates.

• OS detection — detects WSL2 vs native Linux and runs platform-specific setup (do_windows / do_linux).

• Powerline prompt — sets up powerline-go if installed (shows error status and background job count).

• Tool initialization — nvm, atuin, SDKMAN are initialized inside bash_main with existence checks so missing tools don't cause errors.

• SSH wrapper — a generic ssh() function that color-codes the terminal background based on the destination host. Reads host-to-color mappings from ~/.config/ssh-terminal-colors (not tracked). Format: one line per entry, glob_pattern hex_color. Example:

  *prod*   #3b0a0a
  *dev*    #0a3b1a
  

• Local overrides — sources ~/.bashrc.local (not tracked) at the end of bash_main for machine-specific configuration (e.g., toolchain paths, org-specific environment variables).

Ansible setup (~/.config/ansible/)

The playbook setup.yml is the generic, portable configuration tracked by yadm. It handles:

• Third-party repos & keys — Docker, Tailscale, Typora, Ghostty (PPA), VS Code, Google Chrome
• APT packages — dev tools, editors, search tools, Docker, desktop apps, networking, compression utilities
• Snap packages — pdftk
• User-level tools — powerline-go (via go install), atuin, nvm, SDKMAN

For machine-specific or org-specific packages, create ~/.config/ansible/local.yml (not tracked by yadm). This file is automatically included by the playbook if present. It runs as a list of Ansible tasks with become: true already in effect and access to the ubuntu_release variable. Example:

---
- name: Add a custom repo GPG key
  ansible.builtin.shell: |
    curl -fsSL https://example.com/key.pub \
      | gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/example.gpg
  args:
    creates: /etc/apt/keyrings/example.gpg

- name: Add custom repository
  ansible.builtin.apt_repository:
    repo: "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/example.gpg] https://example.com/apt {{ ubuntu_release }} main"
    filename: example

- name: Install org-specific packages
  ansible.builtin.apt:
    name:
      - some-package
    state: present

Files not tracked by yadm

These files are machine-specific and should be created manually or copied separately:

File	Purpose
~/.bashrc.local	Machine-specific shell config (toolchain paths, env vars)
~/.config/ansible/local.yml	Org-specific Ansible tasks (repos, packages)
~/.config/ssh-terminal-colors	SSH host-to-color mappings for the terminal wrapper

Re-running the playbook

The playbook is idempotent — safe to re-run at any time to pick up changes:

ansible-playbook ~/.config/ansible/setup.yml --ask-become-pass

Or re-run the full bootstrap:

yadm bootstrap