Dotfiles, the Prequel: Easy and Fast

In my ongoing quest to explore a variety of ways of managing config files, I believe I have found a way that is attractively simple.

In the following steps, the $REPO_URL should be replaced with (or assigned a value of) the remote URL for the git repo you are using to store your dotfiles. It may look like [email protected]:USERNAME/dotfiles.git or https://github.com/USERNAME/dotfiles.git, for instance, with your username in place of USERNAME and your repository name in place of dotfiles.

Step one: git clone

cd ~
git clone -c status.showUntrackedFiles=no -n --separate-git-dir .git $REPO_URL tmpdir
rm -r tmpdir

Rationale:

• using git clone ensures that the default branch is checked out (specify -b branchname for a different branch than the default)
• status.showUntrackedFiles is set to “no” so that future git status requests only show files that were intentionally tracked with git add and git commit
• -n means no checkout. We aren’t ready for it yet.
• --separate-git-dir .git takes some explanation. It is impossible to git clone into a non-empty directory without some extra steps. This trick does it in one step (two if you count the deletion of the throwaway directory). Tell Git to use a separate Git directory but then, sneaky miscreants that we are, we name the directory the default: .git
• The undesirable but easily-removable side effect is an extra directory tmpdir that has a single .git file of no consequence. The entire directory can safely be removed.

Step two for non-empty repo: git checkout

git checkout

Deal with any file conflicts. For instance, you might backup and remove an existing .bashrc. Then run git checkout again. If you are sure that overwriting is OK, you can pass the force flag:

git checkout -f

Step two if new (empty) repo: add files and push

If this is a brand new setup, your repo is likely empty. Add some files:

git add .bashrc
git commit -m "initial commit of Bash config"

Repeat as necessary with additional files and directories. Then push:

git push

Step three: maintain

Keep your files up to date with git add, git commit, git push. Pull remote changes with git pull. In other words, manage your home directory as you would any other Git repo. Please avoid git add . as that will track every file in your home directory, an undesirable endeavor.

If this spawns other creative ideas or optimizations, feel free to send me feedback!