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Guide to work with dotfiles

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Dhruvin Shah edited this page Apr 14, 2019 · 3 revisions

REF: https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/02/best-way-to-store-dotfiles-git-bare-repo/

Disclaimer: the title is slightly hyperbolic, there are other proven solutions to the problem. I do think the technique below is very elegant though.

Recently I read about this amazing technique in an Hacker News thread on people's solutions to store their dotfiles. User StreakyCobra showed his elegant setup and It made so much sense! I am in the process of switching my own system to the same technique.

The only pre-requisite is to install Git.

In his words the technique below requires:

No extra tooling, no symlinks, files are tracked on a version control system, you can use different branches for different computers, you can replicate you configuration easily on new installation.

The technique consists in storing a Git bare repository in a "side" folder (like $HOME/.dotfiles or $HOME/.myconfig) using a specially crafted alias so that commands are run against that repository and not the usual .git local folder, which would interfere with any other Git repositories around.

Starting from scratch

If you haven't been tracking your configurations in a Git repository before, you can start using this technique easily with these lines:

git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles
alias dotconfig='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'
dotconfig config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no
echo "alias dotconfig='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'" >> $HOME/.bashrc
  • The first line creates a folder ~/.dotfiles which is a Git bare repository that will track our files.
  • Then we create an alias dotconfig which we will use instead of the regular git when we want to interact with our configuration repository.
  • We set a flag - local to the repository - to hide files we are not explicitly tracking yet. This is so that when you type dotconfig status and other commands later, files you are not interested in tracking will not show up as untracked.
  • Also you can add the alias definition by hand to your .bashrc or use the the fourth line provided for convenience.

After you've executed the setup any file within the $HOME folder can be versioned with normal commands, replacing git with your newly created dotconfig alias, like:

dotconfig status
dotconfig add .vimrc
dotconfig commit -m "Add vimrc"
dotconfig add .bashrc
dotconfig commit -m "Add bashrc"
dotconfig push

Install your dotfiles onto a new system (or migrate to this setup)

If you already store your configuration/dotfiles in a Git repository, on a new system you can migrate to this setup with the following steps:

  • Prior to the installation make sure you have committed the alias to your .bashrc or .zsh:
alias dotconfig='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'
  • And that your source repository ignores the folder where you'll clone it, so that you don't create weird recursion problems:
echo ".dotfiles" >> .gitignore
  • Now clone your dotfiles into a bare repository in a "dot" folder of your $HOME:
git clone --bare <git-repo-url> $HOME/.dotfiles
  • Define the alias in the current shell scope:
alias dotconfig='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'
  • Checkout the actual content from the bare repository to your $HOME:
dotconfig checkout
  • The step above might fail with a message like:
error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
    .bashrc
    .gitignore
Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.
Aborting

This is because your $HOME folder might already have some stock configuration files which would be overwritten by Git. The solution is simple.

back up the files if you care about them, remove them if you don't care. I provide you with a possible rough shortcut to move all the offending files automatically to a backup folder:

mkdir -p .config-backup && \
dotconfig checkout 2>&1 | egrep "\s+\." | awk {'print $1'} | \
xargs -I{} mv {} .config-backup/{}
  • Re-run the check out if you had problems:
dotconfig checkout
  • Set the flag showUntrackedFiles to no on this specific (local) repository:
dotconfig config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no
  • You're done, from now on you can now type dotconfig commands to add and update your dotfiles:
dotconfig status
dotconfig add .vimrc
dotconfig commit -m "Add vimrc"
dotconfig add .bashrc
dotconfig commit -m "Add bashrc"
dotconfig push

For completeness this is what I ended up with (tested on many freshly minted Alpine Linux containers to test it out):

git clone --bare https://bitbucket.org/durdn/cfg.git $HOME/.dotfiles
function config {
   /usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME $@
}
mkdir -p .config-backup
dotconfig checkout
if [ $? = 0 ]; then
  echo "Checked out config.";
else
    echo "Backing up pre-existing dot files.";
    dotconfig checkout 2>&1 | egrep "\s+\." | awk {'print $1'} | xargs -I{} mv {} .config-backup/{}
fi;
dotconfig checkout
dotconfig config status.showUntrackedFiles no

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