s000pr 1337 h4xx0r configs up in dis base
I've simply added this here for future reference in case I lose this info.
Instructions provided by Anand Iyer Origin, User StreakyCobra, via Hackernews
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!)
git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles
Now for the fun part. We will make an alias for running git commands in our .dotfiles repository. I’m calling my alias dotfiles:
alias dotfiles='/usr/local/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'
Note from adc: My git was in /usr/bin/git. Never forget the always handy which git
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:
dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no
dotfiles remote add origin git@github.com:anandpiyer/.dotfiles.git
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:
cd $HOME
dotfiles add .tmux.conf
dotfiles commit -m "Add .tmux.conf"
dotfiles push
To set up a new machine to use your version controlled config files, all you need to do is to clone the repository on your new machine telling git that it is a bare repository:
git clone --separate-git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles https://github.com/path/to/repo/.dotfiles.git ~
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:
rsync --recursive --verbose --exclude '.git' tmpdotfiles/ $HOME/
rm -r tmpdotfiles
There you go. No symlink mess.