"How to secure your dotfiles" by @Awan

README.md

This is a copy of the post "How to secure your dotfiles" written by Abdullah that was posted at https://abdullah.today/blog/how-to-manage-dotfiles.html.

You can find a online archived version here: https://archive.is/NwlJj

how-to-manage-dotfiles.md

Today I'm gonna talk about dotfiles. In unix world, most programs are configured command line and they save their configurations in homedir usually a file which names start with a dot. Thus dotfiles.

I have been using many systems and tried many programs to keep a backup of my dotfiles. Now I store my dotfiles in my server which is also a git, mail and web server but not all the users have one. So this post is for them.

So here I’m gonna show you how I store my encrypted dotfiles on github.

Tools required:

keybase, kbfs, gnupg2, git and some brain :P

How to:

I’m using Arch linux so assuming you’re running Arch, and you have knowledge about how gpg works. You must have a gpg keypair. Create an account on https://keybase.io and https://github.com if you haven’t yet.

# pacman -S kbfs keybase         # install them
$ systemctl start kbfs           # start them
$ systemctl start keybase
$ keybase login                  # login to keybase
$ keybase git create "myConfigs"  # Create repo

if you already have a git repo and you wanna use that, just go to the repo dir and rm -rf .git dir.

$ cd "old repo"        # Go to old repo dir
$ rm -rf .git          # delete the .git (old git data)
$ git init             # Start new git repo
$ git add .            # Add all data in the repo
$ git remote add origin keybase://private/"your keybase username"/myConfig
$ git commit -a -m "first commit"
$ git push --set-upstream origin master

Well done. You just created a encrypted repo. Let’s integrate it with github now.

Go to https://github.com/ and create a new empty repo. After creating, just clone it to your computer.

$ cd
$ git clone "your Github username"@github.com:"your Github username"/"your new created repo"
$ cd "your new created github repo(the one you just cloned)"

Configure git to allow keybase protocol:

$ git config --global --add protocol.keybase.allow always

While running these commands in your newly cloned github empty repo, we will add our encrypted keybase repo as a submodule to it.

$ git submodule add keybase://private/"your keybase username"/myConfigs
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "added submodule myConfigs"
$ git push --set-upstream origin master

Done. You’re now secured. Let’s check it out.

Just delete the repo from computer, logout from keybase and clone the repo again. You’ll see nothing.

How to install these configs on new system?

Download required tools, gnupg, keybase, git. Login to keybase, you may have to approve this new device from other logged device if you have another device logged in. Do that and do the following.

$ keybase login
$ git clone "your github unencrypted repository"
$ cd "new cloned repository"
$ git config --global --add protocol.keybase.allow always
$ git submodule update --init

That’s it. Now you will have all your configs unencrypted in your new system.

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