Managing my boxen personal manifest out of my own personal dotfiles repository (instead of in some shared repo where I have to issue PRs to everyone in the company)

README.md

I wanted to move from using a shared copy of my boxen personal manifest to using files managed out of my dotfiles repo. Instead of cutting a pull request every time I want to add a homebrew package to my laptop, I'm managing this like I manage the rest of my dotfiles -- just commit and go.

To do it, I am using a symlink:

% ln -s /Users/rick/.boxen-manifests /opt/boxen/repo/modules/people/manifests/rick

(It's also possible to just commit that symlink directly into the the org's boxen git repo at modules/people/manifests/rick.)

Then, I made one last update to my shared boxen personal manifest, so it looks like this now:

# this is: modules/people/manifests/rick.pp
class people::rick {
  include people::rick::local
}

Then I maintain ~/.boxen-manifests via dotfiles: https://github.com/rick/dotfiles/tree/master/data/.boxen-manifests

Note that there's a file missing (~/.boxen-manifests/private.pp) -- a private section of my boxen manifest is managed out of a private dotfiles directory.

HTH