Dotfile Management

I track my dotfiles with just plain git. Here’s how I do it without making my system think I’m always inside a git repo.

All credit for this method goes to user StreakyCobra on the dreaded orange site.

Here’s what I did to start using this way of doing things:

git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles-repo
alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles-repo/ --work-tree=$HOME'
config config status.showUntrackedFiles no

Then add:

alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles-repo/ --work-tree=$HOME'

To your bashrc to ensure you always get this alias. So we created a repo that’s not at our home directory level, and then create a new alias command that uses that hidden repo as the working tree. What does this let us do?

We can track new files with:

config status
config add .vimrc
config commit -m "Add vimrc"
config add .config/redshift.conf
config commit -m "Add redshift config"
config push

I use branches to track differences between my Linux and MacOS machines just like you would with regular git.

On new machines you can do:

git clone --bare [your-dotfiles-repo] $HOME/.dotfiles-repo

We need to create the same alias as before:

alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles-repo/ --work-tree=$HOME'

Now we are ready to initialize all our files from the repo. You can do this with:

config checkout

You will probably have file conflicts since git will refuse to overwrite files that already exist. You can either delete/backup these files by hand, or if you are like me and need an adrenaline rush you can just force overwrite them:

config checkout -f

Finally we need to make it so we don’t see every other file in our home directory that isn’t tracked:

config config status.showUntrackedFiles no

Now your system is ready to go!