One command to make a fresh Linux or macOS box your own.

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Homie gives you your own curl bash command to paste into a fresh Linux or macOS install that will install all your preferred packages, install your dotfiles, and run setup scripts to make a blank machine your machine.

Step 1:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/USERNAME/dotfiles/main/bootstrap.sh | bash

There is no step 2.

I wrote this because I setup new computers frequently, and nothing I could find did everything I wanted. Ansible was too much ceremony for my personal machines. Chezmoi was awkward for dotfiles and awkward for provisioning. Stow was too limited, Nix was too much.

If you try Homie, I think you’ll find it’s just right: you tell it what packages you want installed, and you give it your dotfiles. It makes simple things easy, and complex things possible. Want to templatize your dotfiles? We got you. Need a script to customize your install? Done.

But to get back to the original story: it’s a single copy-pasted curl-bash line that’s all you need to setup (or update) your system. And it comes from your own repo, so there’s nobody to trust: the shebang you’re running is the shebang you wrote. So give it a whirl, I think you’ll like it.

Get started

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1. Install hm:

   curl -fsSL https://homie.sh/install.sh | bash

2. hm init ~/dotfiles to scaffold a starter repo.
3. Edit homie.toml, commit, and push to your preferred git hosting service.
4. On any other Linux or macOS box: curl …/bootstrap.sh | bash.

Read the quickstart →

What you get

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• Symlinks, not copies. Edit ~/.zshrc and you’re editing the file in your repo. git diff shows what changed. No chezmoi edit indirection.
• One repo, three jobs. Dotfiles + system packages + setup scripts, declared in one homie.toml. No glue between separate tools.
• No state file. Every hm apply is a full reconciliation. Idempotent by construction — re-running is always safe.
• Static binary. No Python, no Ruby, no daemon. ~3 MB, single file.
• Charm-powered TUI. Spinners, progress, a friendly summary at the end. Plain output in CI.

How it looks

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# homie.toml
[user]
name  = "Scout Homes"
email = "scout@homie.sh"

[profile]
name          = "personal"
default_shell = "zsh"

[packages]
all    = ["git", "zsh", "neovim", "tmux", "ripgrep", "fzf"]
fedora = ["util-linux-user", "fd-find"]
ubuntu = ["fd-find"]

[vars]
EDITOR = "nvim"

dotfiles/             ← your repo (call it whatever you like)
  homie.toml
  bootstrap.sh
  home/               ← files into $HOME — .tmpl renders, the rest symlinks
    .zshrc
    .gitconfig.tmpl
  scripts/            ← ordered setup steps
    01-shell.sh
    02-tools.sh

Why not just…?

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