Dotfiles management

Storing and managing dotfiles

Use git to store and manage dotfiles like .vimrc, .bashrc and .tmux.conf. Documents the process outlined here with minor changes and updates.

The basic idea is that we create a Git repository in the home folder. We won’t use the default .git folder in case of conflicts. I’ll use .dotfiles. We also alias a command so we can update the dotfiles repo as needed. I use the command dotfiles as the alias

Create repository to store dotfiles

Create an EMPTY repository somewhere online e.g GitHub.

Add dotfiles to repository

# Create a new empty repo for our dotfiles
git clone --bare https://<dotfiles_repo_link>.git ${HOME}/.dotfiles
# Create an alias dotfiles for dotfiles git commands
alias dotfiles='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'
dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no
# Add dotfiles alias to bashrc
echo "alias dotfiles='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'" >> $HOME/.bashrc

After this, you should be able to add dotfiles to the repo via something like

dotfiles add .tmux.conf
dotfiles add .vimrc
dotfiles add .bashrc
dotfiles commit -m "Add dotfiles"
dotfiles push -f origin master

Setup dotfiles in a new machine

To setup the stored dotfiles in a new machine

git clone --bare https://<dotfiles_repo_link>.git ${HOME}/.dotfiles
alias dotfiles='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'
# This will give you errors if dotfiles already exist on the box so you need to remove them and
# rerun command as required
dotfiles checkout
dotfiles config status.showUntrackedFiles no

You can store these steps as a bash script in GitHub gists and just download and run the script when needed via something like

curl -Lks https://gist.githubusercontent.com/pkharel/436cdd5f0d367b8c0a5d122aa5b3ce07/raw | bash

Notes

It’s helpful to have auto download / auto install scripts in your .vimrc and .tmux.conf to make the process smoother for those applications. For example

.vimrc

" Auto install Plug
let data_dir = has('nvim') ? stdpath('data') . '/site' : '~/.vim'
if empty(glob(data_dir . '/autoload/plug.vim'))
  silent execute '!curl -fLo '.data_dir.'/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim'
  autocmd VimEnter * PlugInstall --sync | source $MYVIMRC
endif

.tmux.conf

# Auto download and install tpm if necessary
if "test ! -d ~/.tmux/plugins/tpm" \
   "run 'git clone https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm ~/.tmux/plugins/tpm && ~/.tmux/plugins/tpm/bin/install_plugins'"