Tutorial for Redacted values

[mallowigi]

Sorry if the question has already been asked.

I tried to understand the documentation but it's not clear to me.

I want to publish my .npmrc for example, but of course I don't want the tokens to be pushed to GitHub. Therefore, I read about the templating section.

I've managed to add the template extension, and execute-template returns the value from the vault as expected.

What I'm struggling to understand is what should i do with my npmrc.

Should I replace the NPM_TOKEN with the template syntax? But in that case my .npmrc will not work anymore...

Or should I rename the .npmrc to .npmrc.tmpl and publish the template only? In that case if I want to change anything in npmrc, do i need to publish it in both the .npmrc and the template?

[halostatue]

dot_npmrc.tmpl will .npmrc with the values replaced using the template.

[mallowigi]

dot_npmrc.tmpl will .npmrc with the values replaced using the template.

That doesn't help me understand. I want to understand what I should do.

I already have the .npmrc file with the hardcoded values. Where do I need to add the template syntax? In the chezmoi cd?

[halostatue]

In general¹, chezmoi reads from a single location (the source tree / source root, usually $HOME/.local/chezmoi/ or a subdirectory thereof—this is usually the target of chezmoi cd as well) and writes to a single location (the target destination, usually $HOME). That means that the dot_npmrc.tmpl in your source tree will become $HOME/.npmrc after being run with templating.

chezmoi cannot see templates outside of the source tree, so yes — you make your file a template in the source tree and it will apply correctly outside of that. You can verify this with chezmoi diff ~/.npmrc to see what will change. I don't have a .npmrc that I have set up this way, but you can see a similar case with this for .gem/credentials (home/private_dot_gem/private_credentials.tmpl).

Footnotes

1. There are exceptions mostly for data safety. ↩