dotfiles

Wednesday 17 February 2016 at 08:00 GMT

I talked about the ramifications of uploading your dotfiles to an online repository yesterday, but I also want to talk a little about the practice.

Assuming you're not running Windows (and if you are, I have no good solution except to stop right now), you probably have a bunch of files starting with "." in your home directory. Here's mine.

$ find ~ -maxdepth 1 \( -type f -o -type l \) -name '.*'
~/.babel.json
~/.bash_history
~/.bash_profile
~/.bashrc
~/.CFUserTextEncoding
~/.DS_Store
~/.gitconfig
~/.gitignore
~/.i3
~/.irb-history
~/.lesshst
~/.mkshrc
~/.NERDTreeBookmarks
~/.netrc
~/.node_repl_history
~/.nvim
~/.nvimrc
~/.profile
~/.racketrc
~/.scala_history
~/.sh_history
~/.sqlite_history
~/.tmux
~/.tmux.conf
~/.viminfo
~/.vimrc
~/.wget-hsts
~/.zcompdump
~/.zcompdump.zwc
~/.zhistory
~/.zlogin
~/.zlogout
~/.zprezto
~/.zpreztorc
~/.zprofile
~/.zshenv
~/.zshrc

Whoa, that's a lot. Let's see which ones I care about. For today, I just want to focus on one. How about .gitconfig, my global Git configuration, for now?

The first thing I'm going to do is create a new Git repository. This repository will be entirely selfish, so I recommend you name it as such. I called mine F••• You, Got Mine, because it makes me giggle every time I use it.

$ git init all-mah-stuff
$ cd all-mah-stuff

I always like to start new repositories with a README to get myself in the right mood.

$ echo '# All Mah Stuff. Hands Off. <3' > README.md
$ git add README.md
$ git commit -m 'README.'

Once you've created it, add a directory named dotfiles. You'll want to keep these in a subdirectory because at some point, you might find yourself adding files that need to be synchronised with your dotfiles but don't count as dotfiles themselves. For example, I have scripts in my bin directory which are used by my dotfiles, so it makes sense to version-control them together. (I had them split for a long time and it drove me nuts.)

Right. Copy your .gitconfig (or whichever file you're using) into your new dotfiles directory. I recommend dropping the "." at this time to make the repository easier to work with—it's tricky to manage lots of hidden files. Commit it with a snarky message.

$ mkdir dotfiles
$ cp ~/.gitconfig dotfiles/gitconfig
$ git commit -m "Here's a gitconfig. No, I don't know what it does either."

Next, we want to replace the .gitconfig file in our home directory with a symbolic link to our copied file.

$ ln -sf $PWD/dotfiles/gitconfig ~/.gitconfig

I expect we'll need to do that a lot, so let's make a script called init which does the job.

#!/bin/bash

DIR="$(cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" && pwd)"

ln -sf "$DIR/dotfiles/gitconfig" ~/.gitconfig

Wonderful. chmod +x init and commit.

The last thing to do is to push this repository somewhere else so we can use the same files on multiple computers. Go ahead and create a repository on GitHub, BitBucket or something else and push, push, push.

Now, whenever you make a change to that file, commit and push. Whenever you're on another computer, git pull and ./init before you get cracking. These two steps will make sure you always have your files synced, wherever you go.