shagen.me

I’m managing my dotfiles with git. My method serves me very well for a many years already and so I think it’s time to write it down.

If you think git, you might think of a dotfile repository and dozens of symlinks into the home directory. This is precisely what kept me from using git until I discovered bare repositories.

Create your dotfile repository with the --bare parameter

$ git init --bare $HOME/.cfg

This creates only a folder for git control files, which normally resides inside the .git folder within the repository.

You can now tell git to use $HOME as your work-tree directory. This makes git handle your home directory like all the files would be within the git repository. Now you can do:

$ git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME add .vimrc
$ git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME commit -m "my .vimrc"

If course it is silly to type out such a long command every time you want to interract with your dotfiles. So we create an alias for it:

$ alias dotfiles='git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME'

Put this in your .bashrc or .kshrc and you can now use the command “dotfiles” in the same way you usually use the command git.

$ dotfiles add .vimrc
$ dotfiles commit -m "my vimrc"

Maybe you were brave and typed dotfiles status already. This will list the content of your whole home directory as “untracked files”. This is not what we want. We can run dotfiles config and tell it to stop doing this:

dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Now dotfiles status will only check what’s being tracked. If you add your vimrc file and later change it, dotfiles status will show it, dotfiles diff will diff it…

You can now use the power of git with your new “dotfiles” command.

If you’re as lazy as I am, and don’t care about carefully curated commit messages, you can create an autoupdate function in your shellrc like this:

dotfiles-autoupdate() {
    MSG="Update $(date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M") $(uname -s)/$(uname -m)"
    config add -u && \
    config commit -m "$MSG" && \
    config push
}

This command takes all changed files and commits them with the date and some machine information. Not creative, but I don’t care. YMMV.

Manage Dotfiles With Git