Purpose

Managing the dotfiles

Create a bare repository to store the history:

git init --bare $HOME/dotfiles

Create an alias in your shell, tell Git where the history and the working tree live:

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

Set up the remote repository for syncing:

dot remote add origin https://<githubtoken>@github.com/<username>/dotfiles.git
dot branch -M main

Tell Git not to show all the untracked files, otherwise all files under $HOME will be shown when running dot status:

dot config status.showUntrackedFiles no

Done! Now we can manage our dotfiles.

dot status
dot add <path-to-your-file/s>
dot commit -m "initial dotfiles commit"
dot push origin main

Clone the dotfiles into a bare repository:

git clone --bare https://<username>:<githubtoken>@github.com/<username>/dotfiles.git $HOME/dotfiles

Define the alias in the current shell scope:

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

Backup the stock configuration files that will be overwritten (example for config dir):

mkdir -p .config-backup
config checkout 2>&1 | egrep "\s+\." | awk {'print $1'} | xargs -I{} mv {} .config-backup/{}

Checkout the actual content from the bare repository to $HOME:

dot checkout

Don't show untracked files and directories:

dot config status.showUntrackedFiles no

Done!

In case some tool/plugin requires this to not be a bare repository, do the following:

dot config core.bare 'false'
dot config core.worktree "$HOME"