Storing Dotfiles in a Git Repo

Everyone has seen those dotfiles repositories on GitHub. There's lots of different ways to manage them, but the method I use now requires no extra tooling (other than git and a command line shell of your choice), no symbolic links to get files into the right locations, can be triggered from any directory on disk, and is easy to replicate on a new system.

Basically what we're going to do is set up a git repository at ~/.cfg or ~/.dotfiles or any directory within your home directory of your choosing (although you probably don't want to use ~/.config since that is the default value of $XDG_CONFIG_HOME), and a shell alias to help manage and control it.

Creating the Repo

If you're setting this up the first time, there's a few steps you'll need to take to set up. First, create the repository:

git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles

This creates a "bare" git repository at ~/.dotfiles. Now we'll set up an alias to interact with it from any directory on disk. Add the following alias to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc or ~/.config/fish/config.fish file, then source the file:

# make sure the --git-dir is the same as the
# directory where you created the repo above.
alias config="git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles --work-tree=$HOME"

The --work-tree=$HOME option sets the directory that the repository tracks to your home directory. Now, since there's probably more files in your home directory that you don't want in the repo than files you do want in the repo, you should configure the repo to not show untracked files by default. We can do that by setting a repository-local configuration option.

config config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Tracking Files

To track files in our new ~/.dotfiles repo, we just need to add them. From any directory on disk, you can run the following command to add your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc or ~/.config/fish/config.fish file to your new dotfiles repo:

config add ~/.bashrc
config add ~/.zshrc
config add ~/.config/fish/config.fish

config commit -m "Add .bashrc/.zshrc/config.fish file"
config push

Installing on a New System

Of course, the main point of doing this is to easily sync your config across new machines. We can easily do this with a small bash script to initialize the system's dotfiles from your git repository.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

git clone --bare [e-mail]:mrjones2014/dotfiles.git $HOME/.dotfiles

# define config alias locally since the dotfiles
# aren't installed on the system yet
function config {
   git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME $@
}

# create a directory to backup existing dotfiles to
mkdir -p .dotfiles-backup
config checkout
if [ $? = 0 ]; then
  echo "Checked out dotfiles from [e-mail]:mrjones2014/dotfiles.git";
  else
    echo "Moving existing dotfiles to ~/.dotfiles-backup";
    config checkout 2>&1 | egrep "\s+\." | awk {'print $1'} | xargs -I{} mv {} .dotfiles-backup/{}
fi

# checkout dotfiles from repo
config checkout
config config status.showUntrackedFiles no

Now, installing your dotfiles on a new system is as simple as running:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mrjones2014/dotfiles/master/scripts/config-init | bash

That's Really It

That's really all there is to it. Now you can easily add and track changes to dotfiles via your new config shell alias.

config add ~/.config/something/somefile
config commit -m "add somefile"
config push

Comment below with your dotfiles repo links! Feel free to browse mine for inspiration.

mrjones2014 / dotfiles

❄️ My dotfiles for NixOS and macOS as a Nix flake. Neovim, Fish shell, Wezterm, etc.

Dotfiles

These are my NixOS and macOS dotfiles, packaged as a Nix flake, using home-manager.

For info on how to set up my Nix flake, see the setup instructions.

Why a Nix Flake

Nix is an incredibly complex piece of software, but despite that, I believe that Nix is the only sensible way to manage software today. Using Nix, and particularly a Nix flake, offers a few unique benefits:

1. Reproducibility: Nix environments are described by text files (*.nix files), and as long as you stay within the guard rails, the environment should be deterministic.
2. Isolation: Packages can have access to their dependencies without those dependencies cluttering up the global environment — this also means different packages can depend on different versions of the same dependency without conflicts.
3. Rollbacks: Totally screw up your environment by accident? Just roll back to a previous generation.
4. Immutability…

View on GitHub

Comments

[ameeno]

I tried to use your scripts,

I ran into a problem with the restore feature. if the current dotfiles are in subdirectories, they don't seem to be movalble to .dotfiles-backup do you know how i can debug this?

[Mat Jones]

I'm not sure what you mean? it works for me.

[྅༻ Ǭɀħ ༄༆ཉ]

The alias config is a neat trick