Save/Sync Dotfiles
First Time Setup
Setting this method up the first time is really easy. First, let’s create our bare repository. I chose to name my placeholder .dotfiles (duh!)
Now for the fun part. We will make an alias for running git commands in our .dotfiles repository. I’m calling my alias dotfiles:
Add this alias to your .bashrc or .zshrc. From now on, any git operation you would like to do in the .dotfiles repository can be done by the dotfiles alias. The cool thing is that you can run dotfiles from anywhere.
Let’s add a remote, and also set status not to show untracked files:
You’ll need to change the remote URL to your git repo. Now, you can easily add the config files you want to be in version control from where they are supposed to be, commit and push. For example, to add tmux config files, I’ll do:
Setting Up a New Machine
To set up a new machine to use your version controlled config files, all you need to do is to clone the repository on your new machine telling git that it is a bare repository:
However, some programs create default config files, so this might fail if git finds an existing config file in your $HOME. In that case, a simple solution is to clone to a temporary directory, and then delete it once you are done:
There you go. No symlink mess.
Got this awesome way to deal with dotfiles from Anand Iuer
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