To facilitate setup of new machines, I keep configuration on GitHub at kristjan/.dotfiles and kristjan/.vim. This way, all I have to do to set up my environment is install Git and clone those repos. .dotfiles comes with an install script that just symlinks each dotfile from ~/.dotfiles/$FILE to ~/$FILE.

A problem, though, is that some tools—like things that talk to GitHub—need a private token or other data to exist somewhere in my configuration. I can’t go putting those in a public repo, so until now I’ve had to either look them up or copy them from an old machine. This time, the old machine is my old laptop sitting at home and available via SSH thanks to Back to my Mac. Rather than remember the ID BTMM assigns me as part of its lengthy hostname, I have another environment variable that also doesn’t belong in a repo. These things were sitting in my configs where I had to git patch around them and ran the risk of at some point accidentally pushing them out.

The solution I’ve landed on is to store these in Dropbox and load them before the rest of my configs and helpers. The top of my .bashrc looks like this:

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HELPERS="
  Dropbox/.env
  .aliases
  .functions
  .nvm/nvm.sh
"

for helper in $HELPERS; do
  if [ -f $HOME/$helper ]; then
    . $HOME/$helper
  fi
done

And Dropbox/.env contains:

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export GITHUB_TOKEN=<token>
export BOBBLE_HOST=bobble.<id>.members.btmm.icloud.com

Now my configs are public and easy to trade with people (which I do regularly to learn new tricks), but private or irrelevant data is safely where only I can see it (assuming the integrity of Dropbox). During setup, I just install Dropbox before I clone my dotfiles, and everything is slightly more magical.