Dotfiles

This repository contains all of my personal dotfiles. such as .vimrc .zshrc, .Xresources and i3. They are published here on GitHub so I can easily clone them whenever I need them.

 

Table of contents

• Clone the repository
• Ignore The Untracked Files
• Commit Your Changes
• Start from scratch
• References

 

Clone the repository

This repository contains a .zshrc file, which you will want to override the default file created by Zsh. If you need to retain your existing .zshrc file, move it to a different spot:

mv ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.bk

Next, ensure that your .dotfiles directory will be ignored by Git (to eliminate recursion issues) by adding to .gitignore:

touch .gitignore
echo ".dotfiles" >> .gitignore

Then, clone this repository into your home directory:

git clone --bare https://github.com/sayems/dotfiles.git $HOME/.dotfiles

Checkout the content of the repository into $HOME:

git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME checkout

If there are conflicts with existing files, Git will let you know like this:

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
    .gitconfig
Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.
Aborting

Be sure to back those up first before moving forward.

Restart your shell session to pick up all the new aliases and configurations.

 

Ignore The Untracked Files

You'll want to tell Git to ignore untracked files when running git status, since this repository will only manage certain hand-picked files in your home directory:

dot config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

 

Commit Your Changes

Suppose you just made a change to your .zshrc file and would like to commit it to your dotfiles repo.

# See your proposed changes
dot status

# Stage up your changes
dot add .zshrc

# Commit it
dot commit -m "Message goes here"

# Push it up
dot push

You'll want to avoid running an "add all" command (like dot add . or dot add -A) since only some of the files in the home directory are tracked by Git.

 

Start from scratch

To bring your existing home directory under version control, initialize a bare git repository there and define an alias to help with managing it:

git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles
alias dot='/usr/local/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'
dot config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Be sure to add the alias to .zshrc, either manually or like this:

echo "alias dot='/usr/local/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'" >> $HOME/.zshrc

Now, you can run ordinary git commands in your home directory using your newly created dotfiles alias:

dot status
dot add .zshrc
dot commit -m "Add zshrc"
dot push

 

References

• Tracking dotfiles directly with Git
• Hacker News: Dotfiles
• The best way to store your dotfiles