machineconfig 8.11

Dotfiles management package

🧠 Welcome to Machineconfig

Machineconfig is a cli-based cross-platform Stack Manager — It is a swiss-army knife; a Package Manager, Configuration Manager, Automation Tool, Dotfiles Manager, Data Solution, and Code Manager, among other functionalities covered, all rolled into one seamless experience, that is consistent across different platforms.

💡 Motivation

Your stack is awesome, but you need stack a manager for it, to put it together and maintain it. What is your stack? Say you have a new computer/ VM, how to set it?

• A bunch of CLI tools.
• [Optional] A bunch of softwares (GUIs for desktop environment)
• [Public] A bunch of configuration files for your tools.
• [Private] A bunch of secrets, passowords, tokens, credentials etc, etc.
• Data (Both highly sensitive and encrypted less serious unencrypted data)
• Code (your repositories).

Wouldn't be nice if you can set it all up in 2 minutes? This is a hackable tool to get it done.

Consider this concrete scenario: When setting up a new machine, VM, or Docker container, you often face dependency chains like this:

flowchart TD
    A["Need to setup my [dev] environment"] --> B["need my tool x, e.g.: yadm"]
    B --> C["Requires git"]
    C --> D["Requires package manager, e.g. brew"]
    D --> E["Requires curl"]
    E --> F["Requires network setup / system update"]
    F --> G["Requires system configuration access"]
    G --> H["Finally ready to start setup the tool x."]

Machineconfig builds on shoulder of giants. A suite of best-in-class stack of projects on github are used, the most starred, active and written in Rust tools are used when possible. The goal is to provide a seamless experience that abstracts away the complexity of setting up and maintaining your digital environment. The goal of machineconfig is to replicate your setup, config, code, data and secrets on any machine, any os, in 5 minutes, using minimal user input. Then, from that point, machineconfig will help you maintain, update, backup and sync your digital life across all your devices, automatically.

⚙️ Functional Overview

Category	Comparable Tools	Description
Package Manager	winget, apt, brew, nix	Installs and manages software packages across systems.
Configuration Manager	Ansible, Chef, Puppet	Configures and maintains system‐level preferences.
Automation Tool	Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, Celery	Automates repetitive tasks, pipelines, orchestration.
Dotfiles Manager	chezmoi, yadm, rcm, GNU Stow	Synchronises dotfiles & personal configs across systems.
Data Solution	rclone, rsync	Handles backups, mirroring and secure file sync.
Code Manager	strong‐box, Vault	Manages and protects code snippets, secrets and creds.

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Install On Windows:

# install tool the tool only:
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"  # Skip if UV is already installed
uv tool install --upgrade --python 3.14 machineconfig
# interactive install of machineconfig and following on to run it and make basic machine configuration (RECOMMENDED):
iex (iwr bit.ly/cfgwindows).Content  # Or, if UV is installed: iex (uvx machineconfig define)
# Quick install and configure (optionals are accepted by default):
iex (iwr bit.ly/cfgwq).Content

Install On Linux and MacOS

# install the tool only:
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh  # Skip if UV is already installed
uv tool install --upgrade --python 3.14 machineconfig
# interactive install of machineconfig and following on to run it and make basic machine configuration (RECOMMENDED):
. <(curl -L bit.ly/cfglinux) # Or, if UV is installed: . <(uvx machineconfig define)

Author

Alex Al-Saffar. email

Contributor

Ruby Chan. email