Alberto Luna's blog

Installing Atuin

Recently I heard about a tool called Atuin that let's you synchronise your terminal command history. I never thought about this, but I think it would be a really cool thing to have.

As terminal commands can contain API keys, passwords, and other sensitive data I decided to not use their cloud service, but to rely on the fact that they offer a self hosted solution and I have a home lab to use.

First thing I did was to install it in my computer to check how it looks, first just offline. I am using macOS and ZSH with OhMyZSH and by default it worked fine. I find a little bit overwhelming that it overrides the behaviour of just pressing arrow up, but I still want to try and use it. It also can be launched with control + R, which I like and find very intuitive.

To install the sync server they offer a preconfigured docker-compose file, which is great for me, because almost all the services I run in my home lab are set up with docker-compose. One thing that impressed me is that they suggest using systemd to manage docker-compose. This never occurred to me as what I always do to start or stop services is to cd to the correct directory and run docker compose up or down. It would be cool to have everything with systemd but before that I would like to learn a little bit more about it. systemd always seemed complicated to setup manually, but it is very powerful.

In the end I decided to not use the sync server. I feel like I do not need to look for commands that I run in other hosts that often and I like the separation.