Developer guide

Warning

If you use an LLM (Large Language Model, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, or Llama) to make any kind of contribution then you will immediately be banned without recourse. See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for more information.

chezmoi is written in Go and development happens on GitHub. chezmoi is a standard Go project, using standard Go tooling. chezmoi requires Go 1.24 or later.

Checkout chezmoi:

git clone https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi.git
cd chezmoi

Build chezmoi:

go build

Run all tests:

go test ./...

chezmoi's tests include integration tests with other software. If the other software is not found in $PATH the tests will be skipped. Running the full set of tests requires age, base64, bash, bzip2, git, gpg, gzip, perl, python3, rage, ruby, sed, sha256sum, tr, true, unzip, xz, zip, and zstd.

Run chezmoi:

go tool chezmoi

Run a set of smoke tests, including cross-compilation, tests, and linting:

make smoke-test

Test building chezmoi for all architectures:

make test-release

Hint

If you use fish as your primary shell, you may get warnings from Fish during tests:

error: can not save history
warning-path: Unable to locate data directory derived from $HOME: '/home/user/.local/share/fish'.
warning-path: The error was 'Operation not supported'.
warning-path: Please set $HOME to a directory where you have write access.

These can be avoided with by running tests with SHELL=bash or SHELL=zsh:

SHELL=bash make test
SHELL=zsh make smoke-test
SHELL=bash go test ./...