Dotfiles

Instructions for the dotfiles repository at https://github.com/makeyourownmaker/dotfiles.

Introduction

The dotfiles in this repository are installed using a bare Git repository. This method does not use symlinks (like most other dotfile repositories).

After the installation, all the dotfiles will be physically present in your home folder, yet, you will still have them under full version control.

Installation

Clone the dotfiles repository to a bare Git repository into ~/.dotfiles
Move your existing dotfiles to ~/.dotfiles.backup
Check out all the dotfiles (and dot-directories) to your home directory

If you don't need your old dotfiles anymore, you can safely delete the ~/.dotfiles.backup directory.

Usage

Now all the dotfiles from the repository are installed in your home directory. However, as mentioned, you still have them under full version control via the bare Git repository in ~/.dotfiles.

To interact with the bare Git repository, you need the following alias:

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

Note: the .bash_aliases file in the dotfiles repository already contains this alias, so you're good to go.

With the dotfiles alias, you can now manage the dotfiles via the bare Git repository, just as you would with the git command:

Edited your dotfiles? No problem, commit and push the changes:

dotfiles add ~/.vimrc
dotfiles commit -m "Edit .vimrc"
dotfiles push

Pushed changes to the remote repository from another machine? Easy, just pull down the new version:

dotfiles pull

Want to know what's going on?

dotfiles status

Don't want to see untracked files:

dotfiles config status.showUntrackedFiles no

References

Using a bare Git repository is described here:

This README.md is a simplified version of https://gist.github.com/weibeld/869f723063811e5088708a9386bf52bf