Yet another dotfiles manager

TL;DR

All you need to manage dotfiles:

alias homekeeper='git --git-dir="${HOME}/.homekeeper" --work-tree="${HOME}"'
echo '*' >> ~/.gitignore

Motivation and differences to other dotfile-keepers

Proxy for Git; familiar commands, no new things to learn
Git-dir is located at ~/.homekeeper, so regular git-commands are not affected and should be safe to use
Your home folder is a git work tree: no linking of files or install scripts. Files versioned in their original locations.
By default everything is ignored at ~/.gitignore
Avoids cluttering homekeeper status with thousands of files
Explicit tracking of selected files with homekeeper add -f
homekeeper ls alias to show what is being tracked

Use at your own risk (I have been for many years)!

2.0: A Slimmed down Version

Old homekeeper worked the same way, but has cumbersome and unnecessarily complex init. I replaced it with a help text hint of a one way to do it.

Installation

Option a) a bash script

Download the script to your PATH:

cd ~/bin
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zemm/homekeeper/master/homekeeper
chmod o+x homekeeper

Option b) slim barebones version

Just add these to your ~/.bashrc or other rc file:

alias homekeeper='git --git-dir="${HOME}/.homekeeper" --work-tree="${HOME}"'
alias homekeeper-ls='git --git-dir="${HOME}/.homekeeper" --work-tree="${HOME}" ls-tree -r --name-only HEAD "${HK_WORK_TREE}"'

Setup and usage

Preparations

Create your remote bare dotfiles repo somewhere (github?)"

Initialization

Do this on every machine where you want your dotfiles to be managed

$ homekeeper init
$ homekeeper remote add origin DOTFILES_REPO_URL

With empty / freshly created dotfiles repo

On a first machine, create an ignorefile to ignore everything by default. We want to only manage explicit files, obviously not our home dir as a whole.

$ echo '*' >> ~/.gitignore
$ homekeeper add --force ~/.gitignore
$ homekeeper commit -m "Ignore everything by default; be explicit"
$ homekeeper push origin master

With existing dotfiles repo

Warning Assert your dotfiles repo has the above .gitignore!
WARNING this is a destuctive operation that will overwrite local files that exist in the dotfiles repo!

$ homekeeper pull origin master
$ homekeeper checkout --force master

Daily usage

Use as you would git, just use homekeeper instead of git. Add new files with homekeeper add --force MY_FILE.

This work is free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License, Version 2,
as published by Sam Hocevar. See http://www.wtfpl.net/ for more details.