Emerson Knapp's Dotfiles

Living devenv setup: dotfiles plus Ansible roles to provision common tools on a new machine. Targets Ubuntu / Pop!_OS. May not always work!

NOTE: put extra env vars in ~/.envvars rather than ~/.zshrc. ~/.dotfiles/zshrc sources it automatically, and it stays out of anything Ansible or tools manage.

Manual pre-prep

Recommended -- upgrade a fresh installation, the live boot disk is likely out of date.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Bootstrap

Run this on a new machine to lay the foundation. It installs a couple base tools and gets you ready to run Ansible. Run it as your normal user (not root); it sudos when needed.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/emersonknapp/dotfiles/main/bootstrap.sh | bash

Provision

Bootstrap doesn't apply any roles so you can pick what this machine needs. Playbooks live in ansible/, run one by name with just:

just converge polymath-desktop

converge installs the Galaxy collection dependencies, then runs ansible/<name>.yml. Playbooks compose roles:

• polymath-desktop -- ek-base, ek-desktop, polymath-dev

Roles (each self-contained):

• ek-base -- shell (oh-my-zsh + zsh), git, tmux, vim, revdiff config; base for any machine
• ek-desktop -- GUI tools: Insync, Vivaldi, VS Code, Regolith
• polymath-dev -- Docker, GitHub CLI, Vagrant, kubectl, Tailscale
• media-editing -- MKVToolNix, OBS Studio

After provisioning

• Connect Tailscale: sudo tailscale up
• For pushing to git remotes over SSH, add an SSH key to GitHub (ssh-keygen, then upload ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub at https://github.com/settings/keys). The clone uses HTTPS, so this is only needed to push.
• For the gh CLI, set the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable.