Obsolete

N.B.: I am now using chezmoi to manage my dotfiles @ https://github.com/returntrip/dotfiles

Dotfiles tracking using git

Version

• Initial version. Was created on Fedora Silverblue but should be distro agnostic
• Minimal customisation. To be kept mostly vanilla in order to be used with other distros
• Contains gpg customisation for YUbikey (pgp/ssh usage)
• Check other branched for customised version (i.e. Fedora Silverblue with toolbox)

First Time Setup

• Initialise bare git repo

git init --bare $HOME/.dotgit

• Create alias to use for dotfile processing

alias dotgit='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotgit/ --work-tree=$HOME'

• Set a local flag for the dotgit repository to not show untracked files to avoid showing untracked files

dotgit config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

• Add the alias to .bashrc

echo "alias dotgit='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotgit/ --work-tree=$HOME'" >> $HOME/.bashrc

• Add GitHub remote

dotgit remote add origin <remote>

Usage

dotgit status
dotgit add .vimrc
dotgit commit -m "Add vimrc"
dotgit add .bashrc
dotgit commit -m "Add bashrc"
dotgit push

Additional system setup

• Add the alias to .bashrc

echo "alias dotgit='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotgit/ --work-tree=$HOME'" >> $HOME/.bashrc

• Add .dotgit to .gitignore to avoid recursion issues

echo ".dotgit" >> .gitignore

• Clone existing repo into bare repo

git clone --bare <git-repo-url> $HOME/.dotgit

• Create alias to use for dotfile processing

alias dotgit='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotgit/ --work-tree=$HOME'

• Checkout the content of the bare repo to the $HOME directory

dotgit checkout

• If an error occurs it is because some files might already exist in the $HOME dir. They can be backed up with this script:

mkdir -p .dotfiles-backup && \
dotgit checkout 2>&1 | egrep "\s+\." | awk {'print $1'} | \
xargs -I{} mv {} .dotfiles-backup/{}

• You can now run dotgit checkout again

• Set a local flag for the dotgit repository to not show untracked files to avoid showing untracked files

dotgit config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Sources

• Hacker News Article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070797
• Atlassian blog: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles
• Another Working Example: https://github.com/Siilwyn/my-dotfiles/tree/master/.my-dotfiles
• Archlinux Wiki which includes host specific brancing and Filtering: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dotfiles#Tracking_dotfiles_directly_with_Git