Sharing Configurations

You can use Fleek to share your configurations across multiple computers. This is useful if you use multiple computers and want to keep your configurations in sync.

Getting Started

After installing and configuring Fleek on your first computer you need to create a new git repository in order to share it with other computers.

Initialize a Git Repository

The default configuration of Fleek adds a shell alias to change directories into your configuration directory. This is useful for initializing a git repository. Use this alias to cd into your configuration directory:

fleeks

Or you can change directories manually:

cd ~/.local/share/fleek

Then initialize a git repository:

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

Create a Repository on GitHub

Create a new repository on GitHub. You can name it whatever you want. For example, fleek.

Here's a shortcut to create a new repository: New Repository

Make a note of the repository URL. You'll need it later.

Add a Remote

Add the GitHub repository as a remote:

git remote add origin git@github.com:$GITHUB_USERNAME/$REPOSITORY.git
git branch -M main
git push -u origin main

Replace $GITHUB_USERNAME with your GitHub username and $REPOSITORY with the name of the repository you created.

If you added a README or License file when you created the repository you'll need to pull those changes before you can push your configuration.

git pull --autostash --rebase origin main
git push -u origin main

Add a New Computer

Now that you've created a shared repository you can add a new computer.

Install Nix

See Installation for instructions on how to install Nix.

It is not necessary to install Fleek directly on the new computer. We'll use Nix to run Fleek without installing it, so it can be self-managed.

Run fleek join

Use nix to run fleek join to initialize Fleek on your new computer. Pass the URL of the repository you created earlier as an argument. This ensures that you're using the same version of fleek on all computers.

nix run "https://flakehub.com/f/ublue-os/fleek/*.tar.gz" -- join git@github.com:$GITHUB_USERNAME/$REPOSITORY.git

Replace $GITHUB_USERNAME with your GitHub username and $REPOSITORY with the name of the repository you created earlier.

Run fleek apply

Use nix to run fleek apply to apply the configuration to your new computer.

nix run "https://flakehub.com/f/ublue-os/fleek/*.tar.gz" -- apply

Set Your Configuration For Easier Sharing

You can set your configuration to make it easier to share your configuration across multiple computers.

In $HOME/.fleek.yml set the git options to do some automatic synchronizing for you.

git:
  autocommit: true
  autopull: true
  autopush: true

Because Nix will ignore unstaged changes in a git repository, Fleek will automatically run git add when it makes changes locally.

Use the autocommit option to automatically stage your local changes. This will make it easier to push your changes to the remote repository.

Use the autopull option to automatically pull changes from the remote repository. This will make it easier to keep your local configuration up to date.

Use the autopush option to automatically push changes to the remote repository. This will make it easier to share your configuration with other computers.

How it Works

Fleek creates an array of systems and an array of users in your .fleek.yml file that represents the computers and user login accounts that you use. The system is identified by the hostname of the computer, and the user is identified by the login username.

Ephemeral Systems

New in version 0.9.25

If you have systems that are short-lived but share the same OS/Architecture, you can create a generic system configuration for all of them to use. Do this if you have systems where you want to use Fleek, but these systems are transient and will go away at some point. This allows you to have a shared configuration for these ephemeral systems without littering your .fleek.yml with system configurations that aren't permanent.

To use this feature set the environment variable FLEEK_HOST_OVERRIDE to the generic name you want to use for this class of systems.

If you use Github Codespaces, GitPod, or Coder, or have a similar system that generates development environments for you, you can create a generic host definition for each unique configuration you want to use.

From my real-world usage that inspired this feature, I use Coder to create development environments for my projects using LXD. I have templates based on Ubuntu and Debian, so I can create one generic host for each of those two environments.

export FLEEK_HOST_OVERRIDE=ubuntudev
fleek init 
# or
fleek join git@github.com:YOU/fleek

Even if the actual host name is coder-ubuntu-bjk, this will set the system in Fleek's configuration file to ubuntudev, which could be used by any number of ephemeral systems that come and go as I work on different projects.

I set the FLEEK_HOST_OVERRIDE to a different value in the Terraform template in Coder, so there's a unique one for my Debian based templates and a unique one for my Ubuntu based templates.

You can make host-specific customizations in ~/.local/share/fleek/ubuntudev/custom.nix and they'll be applied to every system that uses the ubuntudev hostname override.

Additionally you can set the following variables:

• FLEEK_USER_NAME -> Your actual name
• FLEEK_USER_EMAIL -> Your email address (used for configuring git)
• FLEEK_USER_PUBKEY -> Public Key (used for configuring git)
• FLEEK_USER_PRIVKEY -> Private Key (used for configuring git)

And here's the actual block in the Terraform template that creates my Debian development environment:

  env = {
    GIT_AUTHOR_NAME     = "${data.coder_workspace.me.owner}"
    GIT_COMMITTER_NAME  = "${data.coder_workspace.me.owner}"
    GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL    = "${data.coder_workspace.me.owner_email}"
    GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL = "${data.coder_workspace.me.owner_email}"
    FLEEK_USER_NAME     = "${data.coder_workspace.me.owner}"
    FLEEK_USER_EMAIL    = "${data.coder_workspace.me.owner_email}"
    FLEEK_USER_PUBKEY   = "~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub" 
    FLEEK_USER_PRIVKEY  = "~/.ssh/id_rsa"
    FLEEK_HOST_OVERRIDE = "debiandev"
  }