# Migrate away from chezmoi

chezmoi provides several mechanisms to help you move to an alternative dotfile
manager (or even no dotfile manager at all) in the future:

chezmoi creates your dotfiles just as if you were not using a dotfile manager at
all. Your dotfiles are regular files, directories, and symlinks. You can run
[`chezmoi purge`](../../reference/commands/purge.md) to delete all traces of
chezmoi and then, if you're migrating to a new dotfile manager, then you can use
whatever mechanism it provides to add your dotfiles to your new system.

chezmoi has a [`chezmoi archive`](../../reference/commands/archive.md) command
that generates a tarball of your dotfiles. You can replace the contents of your
dotfiles repo with the contents of the archive and you've effectively
immediately migrated away from chezmoi.

chezmoi has a [`chezmoi dump`](../../reference/commands/dump.md) command that
dumps the interpreted (target) state in a machine-readable form, so you can
write scripts around chezmoi.
