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Cade's Dotfiles

Colima intermittently rewrites or breaks `~/.ssh/config`

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Source: Troubleshooting reference

Symptom: tools that parse ~/.ssh/config fail intermittently, or chezmoi diff alternates between a clean file and a leading Colima Include.

Root cause: with sshConfig: true, every Colima start may prepend its exact ~/.colima/ssh_config include. A globbed include in the managed template does not satisfy Colima’s exact-path check, so Colima and chezmoi repeatedly rewrite the same file. Colima writes the file in place, which can also expose a partial config to concurrent readers.

Confirm:

Terminal window
grep '^sshConfig:' ~/.colima/*/colima.yaml
grep -n '\.colima/.*ssh_config' ~/.ssh/config
chezmoi diff ~/.ssh/config

Fix: update the dotfiles checkout and rerun bootstrap.sh. The macOS services installer sets sshConfig: false in Colima’s default template and all existing profiles, while chezmoi removes the Colima include from the managed SSH config. Docker is unaffected. Use colima ssh to enter the VM, or use the separately generated config without loading it globally:

Terminal window
ssh -F ~/.colima/ssh_config colima