I purchased a cheap, portable laptop off eBay back before the end of the year intending to use it to RDP into my primary development machine. This will give me some flexibility on where I can work on my homelab inside the network at my house. This will eventually be used outside of my house once I establish the means to connect into the network securely with something like a VPN.

Goals

  • Setup Windows on new development terminal
  • Begin refactoring my dev-bootstrap project to support different configurations on different machines.

Findings/Results

  • My terminal is intended to mostly be a way to interact with remote desktop so I do not need all of the heavier development tools on it. It would still be convenient to be able to manage its configuration consistently though so I started refactoring my dev-bootstrap project to read in a JSON file like the following: 
      {
    "enableRemoteDesktop": true,
    "timezone": "Eastern Standard Time",
    "wslDistributions": [
      {
        "name": "dev",
        "source": "Ubuntu",
        "default": true
      },
      {
        "name": "dev2",
        "source": "Ubuntu"
      },
      {
        "source": "Ubuntu"
      }
    ]
  }

    This will eventually be expanded to include the other configurations like the selection of Chocolatey and winget packages in Windows, and which packages are installed in WSL. The file shown above is intended to be pulled onto the development machine through chezmoi from a user’s dotfiles repository. This would allow for some light templating if needed and would allow them to specify how they want their machine to be configured.

    • :warning: I have not yet found a way to parameterize Boxstarter except through the URL used to kickstart the process. This means the GitHub username for the dotfiles repository clone is hard coded for now. It might be interesting to deploy a simple server which will serve the Boxstarter PowerShell script, but would allow for the username and maybe some other light options to be templated. Doing so securely would need to be heavily considered.