Epic: Personalize workspaces from a user-configurable dotfiles repository

[dnsmichi]

Proposal

Provision the environment from a dotfiles repository, e.g. https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/dotfiles

May need a special entry point in the .gitpod.yml similar to init/tasks: https://www.gitpod.io/docs/config-gitpod-file

Context

Question from @eddiejaoude in the stream at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOrr4r_pNQc

GitHub Codespaces provides this feature: https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/customizing-your-codespace/personalizing-codespaces-for-your-account#dotfiles

Possible Workarounds

Manual commands in .gitpod.yml and automate the setup of a dotfiles repository.

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More details in the RFC

[dnsmichi]

FYI @gtsiolis @pawlean

[eddiejaoude]

Yes please! This would be amazing 💥

[bigint]

Love to see it ✨

[ghuntley]

This has been heavily discussed internally and yes, we want to do it or help enable someone in the community to do it!

Internal discussion link.

[svenefftinge]

This needs to be a user setting.
I think codespaces did a great job on this and we should implement the same semantics as described here.

The settings should go under a new entry 'Dotfiles'.

[JanKoehnlein]

I'd love to have that as well, but it doesn't currently fit into our schedule. Could you bring this up again later?

[dac09]

Just leaving a suggestion here: I don't think dotfiles should necessarily be provided in the gitpod.yml - because it's highly personal. I'd much prefer to set the dotfiles on my account only, and not force my team to use my dotfiles too :)

[eddiejaoude]

Yep, I would not want my team to have the same dotfiles either, but I would like my dotfiles to load automatically into my gitpod environment - this is similar to CodeSpaces.

[axonasif]

Just leaving a suggestion here: I don't think dotfiles should necessarily be provided in the gitpod.yml - because it's highly personal. I'd much prefer to set the dotfiles on my account only, and not force my team to use my dotfiles too :)

Agreed ;)

[JanKoehnlein]

We're currently still swamped, but this issue will be definitely reconsidered when you bring add it to groundwork again later.

[csweichel]

Filling in some more detail here.

Configuration and user flow

Users would point to a repository in their settings on the dashboard. This needs some visual design @gtsiolis.
When a workspace starts, prior to starting the IDE we'd clone the repo and put it in the home directory. Hence, when the IDE starts it'll pull files like .bashrc and .bash_profile.

API changes

We could add a dotfiles_repo field to the StartWorkspaceSpec API. ws-manager would translate that field to a SUPERVISOR_ env var which supervisor would load as part of its workspace specific configuration.

Implementation

in supervisor prior to starting the IDE we'd run git clone --depth 1 on the dotfile repo, cloning it into $HOME/.dotfiles. Once the clone is complete, we'd symlink the files from the dotfiles repo into the home directory. Compared to moving the files into place, we retain the repository hence folks can make changes to their dotfiles and commit them back.