Keeping track of your configuration and deploying it on new machines is quite easily done with Git and maybe a fancy system like GNU Stow. However, installing all of the software that you use can be annoying, especially if you realize after a few days that a part of your setup is slightly broken because you forgot to install a package.
The obvious solution to that problem is to use a declarative package manager like Nix. However, systems built around those are quite complex and many users might not want to switch to using them.
Instead, Debian (and Ubuntu/other derivatives) users can simply build themselves
a .deb metapackage, that is a package that installs nothing on its
own but depends on other packages. A simple metapackage is trivial to build and
is a convenient way to install many packages at once.
To do so, create a file mysetup/DEBIAN/control looking something
like this:
Package: mysetup Version: 1.0 Section: custom Priority: optional Architecture: all Depends: bspwm, firefox-esr, neovim Essential: no Maintainer: Me! Description: Metapackage with everything I care about
Use dpkg-deb --build mysetup and you will have build a
mysetup.deb package. That's it! You can now ship it to any host,
use apt install ./mysetup.deb and all of the packages under
Depends will be installed.
Additional steps might include packaging in setup scripts that are run after installation, e.g. to fetch your configuration from the internet and symlink it.