Personalizing GitHub Codespaces for your account

About personalizing Codespaces

When using any development environment, customizing the settings and tools to your preferences and workflows is an important step. GitHub Codespaces allows for two main ways of personalizing your codespaces.

• Settings Sync - You can use and share Visual Studio Code settings between GitHub Codespaces and other instances of Visual Studio Code.
• Dotfiles – You can use a dotfiles repository to specify scripts, shell preferences, and other configurations.

GitHub Codespaces personalization applies to any codespace you create.

Project maintainers can also define a default configuration that applies to every codespace for a repository, created by anyone. For more information, see "Introduction to dev containers."

Settings Sync

Settings Sync allows you to share configurations such as settings, keyboard shortcuts, snippets, extensions, and UI state across machines and instances of Visual Studio Code.

To enable Settings Sync, in the bottom-left corner of the Activity Bar, select and click Turn on Settings Sync…. In the dialog box, select the settings you'd like to sync.

For more information, see the Settings Sync guide in the Visual Studio Code documentation.

Dotfiles

Dotfiles are files and folders on Unix-like systems starting with . that control the configuration of applications and shells on your system. You can store and manage your dotfiles in a repository on GitHub. For advice and tutorials about what to include in your dotfiles repository, see GitHub does dotfiles.

Your dotfiles repository might include your shell aliases and preferences, any tools you want to install, or any other codespace personalization you want to make.

You can configure GitHub Codespaces to use dotfiles from any repository you own by selecting that repository in your personal GitHub Codespaces settings.

When you create a new codespace, GitHub clones your selected dotfiles repository to the codespace environment, and looks for one of the following files to set up the environment.

• install.sh
• install
• bootstrap.sh
• bootstrap
• script/bootstrap
• setup.sh
• setup
• script/setup

If none of these files are found, then any files or folders in your selected dotfiles repository starting with . are symlinked to the codespace's ~ or $HOME directory.

Any changes to your selected dotfiles repository will apply only to each new codespace, and do not affect any existing codespace.

Enabling your dotfiles repository for Codespaces

You can use your selected dotfiles repository to personalize your GitHub Codespaces environment. Once you choose your dotfiles repository, you can add your scripts, preferences, and configurations to it. You then need to enable your dotfiles from your personal GitHub Codespaces settings page.

1. No canto superior direito de qualquer página, clique na foto do seu perfil e em Configurações.

   

2. Na seção "Código, planejamento e automação" da barra lateral, clique em Codespaces.

3. Under "Dotfiles", select Automatically install dotfiles so that GitHub Codespaces automatically installs your dotfiles into every new codespace you create.

4. Choose the repository you want to install dotfiles from.

You can add further script, preferences, configuration files to your dotfiles repository or edit existing files whenever you want. Changes to settings will only be picked up by new codespaces.

If your codespace fails to pick up configuration settings from dotfiles, see "Troubleshooting dotfiles for GitHub Codespaces."

Other available settings

You can also personalize GitHub Codespaces using additional options in your personal settings:

• To enable GPG verification, see "Managing GPG verification for GitHub Codespaces."
• To set your editor, see "Setting your default editor for GitHub Codespaces."
• To set how long a codespace can remain unused before it is automatically stopped, see "Setting your timeout period for GitHub Codespaces."
• To set the period for which your unused codespaces are retained, see "Configuring automatic deletion of your codespaces."
• To set your default region, see "Setting your default region for GitHub Codespaces."

Further reading

• "Creating a new repository"