Dotfiles

The dotfiles in this repository are installed using a bare Git repository. This method does not use symlinks (unlike most other dotfile repositories).

After the installation, all the dotfiles will be saved at exact location as in this repository with ~/ as the root folder.

First Time Setup

Create a bare repository with an appropriate name. I follow the convention .dotfiles.

mkdir $HOME/.dotfiles
git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles

Now we create an alias dotfiles for running git commands in our .dotfiles repository. Add this alias to your .bashrc or .zshrc. Nice part is that now we can run this command from anywhere.

alias dotfiles='$(which git) --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'

Now we add a remote. Remember to change the following url to point your git repo.

dotfiles remote add origin git@github.com:MrPandey01/dotfiles.git

Also set the status to not show untracked files whenever we run dotfiles status command.

dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

That's all! Now you can use dotfiles command as a replacement of the usual git command to add, commit and push dotfiles. For instance

dotfiles add ~/.tmux.conf ~/.zshrc
dotfiles commit -m "add .tmux.conf and .zshrc"
dotfiles push

Setting Up a New Machine

To use the same dotfiles on a new machine, all we need to do is clone this repository and tell git that it is a bare repository. To avoid git clone errors when some default dotfiles are already present, we first clone it into a temporary folder and then locally copy and over-write the existing ones.

git clone --separate-git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles https://github.com/MrPandey01/dotfiles.git tmpdotfiles
rsync --recursive --verbose --exclude '.git' tmpdotfiles/ $HOME/
rm -r tmpdotfiles

Done!