Dotfiles

Coder offers the coder dotfiles <repo> command which simplifies workspace personalization. Our behavior is consistent with Codespaces, so their documentation explains how it loads your repo.

You can read more on dotfiles best practices here.

From templates

Templates can prompt users for their dotfiles repo URL, which will personalize your workspace automatically.

Template admins: this can be enabled quite easily with a our dotfiles module using just a few lines in the template.

Personalize script

Templates may be configured to support executing a ~/personalize script on startup which users can populate with commands to customize their workspaces.

You can even fill personalize with coder dotfiles <repo>, but those looking for a simpler approach can inline commands like so:

#!/bin/bash
sudo apt update
# Install some of my favorite tools every time my workspace boots
sudo apt install -y neovim fish cargo

Template admins: refer to this module to enable the ~/personalize script on templates.

Setup script support

User can setup their dotfiles by creating one of the following script files in their dotfiles repo:

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

If any of the above files are found (in the specified order), Coder will try to execute the first match. After the first match is found, other files will be ignored.

The setup script must be executable, otherwise the dotfiles setup will fail. If you encounter this issue, you can fix it by making the script executable using the following commands:

cd <path_to_dotfiles_repo>
chmod +x <script_name>
git commit -m "Make <script_name> executable" <script_name>
git push