/dotfiles

Purely git-based dotfiles.

Primary LanguageVim Script

This repository is mine. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Dotfiles repositories are used to manage, track and assist in the deployment of personalized configurations. A number of ways exist for managing dotfiles via git. As much as possible, this one tries to be just git with all the good and bad that comes along with that.

Getting Started

Setting up a new home directory to use this repository is as simple as:

$ git init
$ git remote add origin git@github.com:MurphyMarkW/dotfiles.git
$ git pull origin home
$ git submodule update --init --recursive

Since the home directory will likely not be empty, git may complain about files that would be overwritten. If you want to preserve those files, you should rename them or move them to another location. Once done, you can forcefully overwrite any conflicting files by performing a

$ git reset --hard origin/master

Note that this will not affect any files that do not have corresponding entries in the repository.

Special Considerations

Certain conventions are used by these dotfiles that may seem odd or confusing when first encountered. Please read through these if it is your first time using these dotfiles, as they are important to know!

git all the way down

This style of dotfile management makes a concious decision to make the home directory itself a git repository. This has the benefit that any file within a subtree of the home directory can be managed by the git repository without any special mechanism other than a simple git add -f <file>. Always want that ~/src/my-special-script/foo.sh to be present on every system? Just add it to the repository and git pull to victory!

.gitignore

Because of the above, the gitignore is set to match everything (*) to prevent accidentally adding files to the repo. A side effect of this is that the first time a file is added the -f / --force flag will be required. This should add a natural interrupt in most people's git usage since the -f is not usually added to git commands by default (if you are doing that - don't!). Subsequent updates to added files are performed as normal. Because git will use the first repository that is encountered while traversing to the root of the filesystem tree, this will not affect any additional git repositories that exist within this repository.

secrets

From the HashiCorp Vault documentation,

A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more.

Secrets do not belong in dotfiles repositories. As much as possible, try to prevent committing and pushing secrets to public repositories, dotfiles or otherwise. If you believe you've done this, please review the documentation on how to handle removal of sensitive data.

References: