localdir

This is my personal ~/.local directory, containing scripts and application configuration. One might also refer to these files as "dotfiles", for mostly historical reasons.

As I have some very specific requirements for what my work environment should behave like, the setup here mostly likely differs quite significantly from what you might expect in a "normal" environment. It is not recommended to just copy-paste files from in here as-is.

Readers are, however, invited to take a look at it, get ideas for their own setup, and drop comments, suggestions, questions and bug reports if something feels odd—beyond the intended base oddity level, of course.

XDG/FHS

My goal is to keep the top-level user home directory as clean as possible by honouring the XDG base directory specification, adapted to recreate the Linux file system hierarchy (FHS) under ~/.local. This is achieved by setting the environment variables as follows:

Variable	Location
XDG_CACHE_HOME	~/.local/var/cache
XDG_CONFIG_HOME	~/.local/etc
XDG_DATA_HOME	~/.local/share
XDG_STATE_HOME	~/.local/var/lib
XDG_LIB_HOME	~/.local/lib
XDG_LOG_HOME	~/.local/var/log

Notes

• XDG_LIB_HOME and XDG_LOG_HOME are non-standard, but they are nevertheless necessary for representing the FHS locally.
• ~/.local/var is technically not supposed to be on this level (~/.local is the user version of /usr/local), but for keeping it compact, I put it here anyway.
• Some applications unfortunately do not honour the XDG basedir spec, so I additionally set environment variables or write wrapper scripts. Unfortunately, there are still some open issues). See the XDG Base Directory article in the Arch Linux wiki for more information on this.

Furthermore, the $PATH variable is expanded to contain the following locations:

Location	Description
~/.local/bin	User-specific executables
~/.local/lib/dotfiles/wrappers	User-specific wrappers

Requirements

A POSIX-compatible shell must be available and configured as follows:

• XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set to ~/.local/etc;
• The configuration files in ~/.local/etc/sh are sourced as follows:
  • profile › interactive › login if it's an interactive login shell;
  • interactive if it's a regular interactive shell;
• Systemd is present (or at least the environment generators in /usr/lib/systemd/user-environment-generators are).

This repository provides configuration for ZSH that does this already. Other shells must be configured separately. See Appendix B if ZSH is desired but not available.

Assumptions

/usr/sbin, /sbin and /bin are assumed to have merged into /usr/bin (note that this is a more extreme case of the /usr merge).

Many private configuration files (e.g. mail configuration) reside in my external localdir repository, cloned to $XDG_LIB_HOME/private (if missing, there will be some dangling symlinks in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, and the corresponding applications might not work properly).

Installation

1. git clone https://github.com/ayekat/localdir ~/.local;
2. ln -s .local/etc/zsh/.zshenv ~/.zshenv;
3. One of the following methods:

Method 1: With user@ override

If you have full control over the system (or a nice sysadmin), configure the user instance to set XDG_CONFIG_HOME to your user's ~/.local/etc.

Assuming you are ayekat with UID 1234:

systemctl edit [email protected], then

[Service]
Environment=XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/home/ayekat/.local/etc

Method 2: With ~/.config symlink

If you do not have necessary permission to apply method 1, you can instead set up this band-aid compatibility symlink:

ln -s .local/etc ~/.config

This is required because the user instance does not adapt XDG_CONFIG_HOME even if set via environment.d generator, so just limiting ~/.config to environment.d is not sufficient.

Just expect ~/.config and ~/.local/etc to be used interchangeably by your programs, and everything being a mess.

Appendix A: Rules

• If an application does not respect the XDG base directory specification at all, we try to fix it either via environment variable in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/environment.d/xdg.conf (if possible), or through a wrapper script. If such an application mixes configuration and state information, we cannot reasonably track the configuration in Git anyway, so we make it drop its data into XDG_STATE_HOME.

• Commandline history files go into XDG_STATE_HOME, and not elsewhere. XDG_LOG_HOME only contains files that are not read back by the application, and XDG_CACHE_HOME only contains files that can be easily regenerated; both do not apply to history files.

• Shell-agnostic configuration should happen in XDG_CONFIG_HOME/sh. This allows other, non-zsh shells to work correctly, too, without having to duplicate all the shell configuration. The shell-agnostic configuration is stored in sh/config, sh/profile, sh/interactive and sh/login (plus the respective .d subdirectories), while only shell-specific configuration should happen in their respective shell's configuration.

• Although shell aliases are generally more lightweight than wrapper scripts, wrapper scripts allow being used from any environment (not just interactive shells). So it mostly depends on the application and usecase whether we create an aliase or a wrapper script for something.

Appendix B: ZSH

This section addresses some cases where ZSH is not available as a login shell (or not available at all), and you lack the necessary permissions on the system to fix that properly.

Not available as login shell

If ZSH is installed, but for some reason chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh does not work, the following should fix that (assuming Bash is the login shell):

# ~/.bash_login
ZDOTDIR=~/.local/etc/zsh zsh -l && exit

It is not recommended to use exec zsh, as any issue with the ZSH invocation might lead to you getting locked out.

Not available at all

If ZSH isn't installed on the system, do not despair! ZSH can be built and installed into your home directory.

To do so, ensure that the necessary build tools are available (make and gcc, and the ncurses development headers if packaged separately).

If building on the target system is not an option, just ensure that your build environment provides ncurses and glibc installations that are ABI-compatible with what is installed on the target system, and the paths (home directory location) are the same. The easiest way is probably by building a local VM that resembles the target system.

1. Get the ZSH source and cd into the project directory;
2. ./configure --prefix="$HOME/.local/opt/foobar" (replace foobar by something more suitable);
3. make
4. make install

If all went well, ZSH is now installed in ~/.local/opt/foobar. Copy that directory to the target system at the same location. You may now invoke ~/.local/opt/foobar/bin/zsh.

To set it as a "login shell", the following should work (again, assuming Bash as the login shell):

# ~/.bash_login
export PATH=~/.local/opt/foobar/bin:$PATH
ZDOTDIR=~/.local/etc/zsh zsh -l && exit

Note that you can also just invoke ~/.local/opt/foobar/bin/zsh directly without extending $PATH like that, but that will look a bit ugly in the process list.

Links

• XDG Base Directory - ArchWiki
• https://github.com/Earnestly/home (inspired by Plan9's filesystem layout; see also The ~/.local Convention).
• https://github.com/roosemberth/dotfiles (semi-fork of this repo, adapted for NixOS).