I wipe my systems, especially on Linux where data protability is much easier than on Windows or macOS, fairly regularly. For systems where I log in fairly regularly, such as my WSL sandbox or development server, I like to have my various dotfiles and scripts synced.
This also works for something like macOS. When I received a new workstation from work, I was able to get things up and going quite quickly even though I had opted to reconfigure everything from the beginning.
There isn’t really much of a need to use a specific dotfile manager. git is
all you need.
Creating a dotfile store
Creating a dotfile store is as easy as creating a folder and create a bare Git repo inside of it.
mkdir ...
cd ...
git init --bare
The files created in this directory are usually put in the .git folder in
most Git repositories. This folder will store all the Git data, while we treat
our entire home folder as the “source code” of our project.
To take advantage of this, we’ll need to use Git with some arguments, the easiest way of going about it is creating an alias.
# ~/.bashrc
export DOTFILES_DIR="$HOME/src/itisrazza/dotfiles"
alias dfgit="git --git-dir=\"${DOTFILES_DIR}\" --work-tree=\"${HOME}\""
Adding files to the repo
You can now use the dfgit alias to add files from anywhere in your home
folder as if you were in a git repo.
dfgit add ~/.bashrc
dfgit commit
Pusing and pulling changes
We’re going through the basic motions at this point.
# push the changes (for the first time)
dfgit remote add origin git@github.com:itisrazza/dotfiles.git
dfgit push --set-upstream origin "$(dfgit branch --show-current)"
dfgit push
dfgit pull
Cloning the changes to a new system
Setting these up on a new system is also quite easy. Once you set Git and your
SSH keys up. You can simply clone the repository with the --bare argument.
git clone --bare git@github.com:itisrazza/dotfiles.git ~/src/itisrazza/dotfiles
Tips for dotfile management
Now that dotfiles are used across multiple systems, they may not offer the same commands and environments. Here are some tricks I use to make them easier to move about.