Startup Scripts and Configuration Files (dotfiles)

All my shell-related startup scripts and configuration files in one place. With multiple laptops, each with their own WSL, and user accounts for remote servers to worry about, having all these files (finally) backed up and under version control will help me synchronize my many shell environments and take a massive cognitive load off my head.

Files

• For the Bourne Again Shell (bash):

  • .bash_profile: Logon script.
  • .bashrc: Shell startup script.

• For the Git version control system:

  • .gitconfig: Configuration file for global settings, most notably my command aliases.
  • .gitfuncs: Script file to source from .gitconfig for more complicated command aliases.

• For Windows PowerShell: (deprecated as I always use Git Bash on Windows now)

  • Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1: Shell startup script.

• Various scripts to add to PATH: bin/.

Setup

Many startup scripts must be located at a specific path on the filesystem, so in order to get all of them in one place for convenient version control, symlinks should be created at their original paths and linked to the files here.

Not Windows

On non-Windows systems, you should be able to just run:

./setup.sh

This will create symlinks under the $HOME directory pointing towards the files in the local copy of this repository. This also compiles any source code specified in the Makefile into bin/ and copies its contents into a special ${HOME}/bin directory. These are scripts or binaries intended to be included on one's $PATH.

⚠️ This means that .bashrc or the appropriate startup script should make sure ${HOME}/bin is added to $PATH:

export PATH="${HOME}/bin:${PATH}"

Windows

In Windows, ln -s does not work as expected. Instead, you have to use the mklink command in CMD in Administrator Mode:

mklink LINK TARGET

For my particular case, this repository is located under my home directory, at the expansion of %USERPROFILE\repos\startup-config. For example, since .bashrc must be at the top-level of the home directory, to set up the symlink I would run:

mklink "%USERPROFILE%\.bashrc" "%USERPROFILE%\repos\startup-config\.bashrc"

An exception was the PowerShell profile Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1. Apparently, the PowerShell interpreter cannot resolve symlinks, so I simply replaced the content of the file at $profile to source my script in this repository:

<# Delegate startup code to my version-controlled script elsewhere #>
. "${HOME}\repos\startup-config\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1"

Original paths, where ~ denotes my %USERPROFILE%:

• ~/.bash_profile
• ~/.bashrc
• ~/.gitconfig
• ~/.gitfuncs
• ~/Documents/WindowsPowerShell/Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

For the standalone scripts or binaries, copy them to our special bin/ directory under our home directory.

mkdir "~/bin"
# Add %USERPROFILE%\bin to the Path user environment variable.
cp bin/binary_name.exe ~/bin

Note that you if you're setting up the directory and PATH for the first time, you probably need to restart your computer to see the effect.

Syncing

.bashrc defines the sync_config function, which you can use to update the local repository directly from the command line:

sync_config

Note that, at the moment, you will also have to manually run the setup.sh script again if there are new symlinks to create or updated binaries to compile.