How to share/transfer an Atom installation (packages and settings) from one Mac to another?

Is it possible to copy Atom from one Mac to another, including all installed packages, settings etc?

There are several ways to synchronize your settings and packages between Atom installations:

• Git: Create a public or private Git repo and store the contents of your local ~/.atom folder in there. Ignore the following files/directories in a .gitignore file:

    storage
    compile-cache
    dev
    .npm
    .node-gyp
  

• Use a package like sync-settings. This will store your configuration in a GitHub Gist.

• Dropbox (or similar): Move your ~/.atom folder to your Dropbox folder and then symlink it from there to its original location. This has the downside of syncing everything in ~/.atom, even the things you could ignore.

• Use stars to select your favorite packages. On the Atom web site, create an account and mark your favorite packages with stars. Then use apm stars --install to install all starred packages on any machine. Downside: This only works for packages, not for settings.

More details:

• https://discuss.atom.io/t/syncing-settings-packages-between-machines/1385

As a user who uses a dotfile management system such as RCM, I prefer independent config files.

For now, Atom doesn't officially provide a packages.cson file to manage plugins, but as the post Syncing settings & packages between machines mentioned, there is a plugin called package-sync that will generate a packages.cson file for us.

So with the help of package-sync, now I can just sync those mininal config files to have my Atom settings and packages consistent across multiple machines.

This is how to do it (Use ubuntu as an example):

1. Install Atom, and install package-sync through Edit-->Preferences-->Install as the screen shot shows:

2. Open your command pallete and type: Create Package List and there will be a packages.cson file under your ~/.atom folder.

3. Edit the gitignore file:

   $ gedit ~/.atom/.gitignore

Make sure the content is:

blob-store
compile-cache
dev
storage
.node-gyp
.npm
.apm
packages/
atom-shell/

This is a screenshot of the .gitignore file:

This makes sure the content downloaded by Atom from the Internet will not get synced to your dotfiles repo.

4. Move the .atom folder to the dotfile repo:

   $ mv ~/.atom ~/dotfiles/tag-atom/atom

5. Relink the folder:

   $ ln -s ~/dotfiles/tag-atom/atom ~/.atom

   Or if you have rcm installed:

   $ rcup

6. Now go to another machine, and install Atom and package sync. Update your dotfiles repo, and then Open your Atom command pallete and type: sync

Now your Atom settings will get synced and integrated with the RCM dotilfe management system.

This is the files in my ~/.atom folder that get synced:

I recently built a package that syncs automatically your Atom settings and packages across multiple computers. A little bit like the bookmark synchronization mechanism in Google Chrome. It's called atom-package-sync. Maybe it could fit your needs.

You can sync your packages via package-list.txt file and a simple shell script.

Create the package-list.txt file

apm list --installed --bare > package-list.txt

Install missing packages on another host

BASEDIR="$(cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" && pwd)"
INSTALLEd_PKGS=$(apm list --installed --bare)
for PKG in $(cut -f1 -d@ $BASEDIR/package-list.txt); do
    grep -q $PKG <<< $INSTALLEd_PKGS || apm install $PKG
done

The .atom folder contains the packages folder, which can be rather huge. Unfortunately OneDrive doesn't allow you to exclude folders, so I went with a git option.

I excluded the packages from git and instead I committed a text file containing my packages (my-packages.txt).

To re-install packages I need to run: apm install --packages-file my-packages.txt.

To generate the my-packages.txt, I need something like this on a Bash shell: ls packages | xargs -n 1 echo | cut -d/ -f1 > my-packages.txt

I sync my Atom settings between Windows, macOS, and Linux machines using Resilio Sync Home. It is free and the files are not saved on the "cloud" (like Dropbox or Gists), but it requires that, at least, two machines are online in order to sync the current settings.

I do not want to sync caches, installation specific settings, et al., I update the .sync/IgnoreList file that is created in the synced directory (i.e., the ~/.atom directory). Unfortunately, you will have to update this on each machine that you sync (ironically, the IgnoreList file is not synced). By default, the file specifies various temporary files to be omitted from syncing, so you'll need to add the following:

## Atom-specific
/packages/node-debugger/debugger.log
\packages\node-debugger\debugger.log
/.apm
\.apm
/.node-gyp
\.node-gyp
/.npm
\.npm
/blob-store
\blob-store
/compile-cache
\compile-cache
/dev
\dev
/recovery
\recovery
/split-diff
\split-diff
/storage
\storage

Some of the omitted directories are package-specific (e.g., split-diff). Because Windows has different path delimiters than other platforms, I need to specify both(!!)

1. Install Resilio Sync Home on your first machine
2. Add the .atom directory to Resilio to be synced.
3. Update its IgnoreList file, as shown above. Save this file for the other machines you want to sync with.
4. Send a Resilio "Read & Write" link of that folder to the other machines you want to sync with or copy the "Read & Write" key to be used on the other machines. To do this, in Resilio's folder view, click on the .atom folder's menu (vertical dots on the right edge) and select "Copy Read & Write key". Save it for later.

Then on your other machines,

1. Install Resilio Sync Home
2. Create .atom/.sync
3. Copy the IgnoreList from your first machine to that directory
4. Add the .atom directory to be synced with the other machine. You should add the folder using "Enter key or link," then enter the key you copyed, above.
5. Wait until syncing is done before opening Atom. The first time will may take a few minutes.

Now I don't need to go around installing/removing packages on every machine, separately!

FYI: Changes to files and directories are saved in .sync/Archive, for some period of time, if you should need to recover them.