dotfiles

My dotfiles, tracked in a bare git repository. No fuss, no special sauce.

Technique borrowed from Nicola Paolucci's blog post and Derrick Reimer.

Installation

Install Zsh and Oh My Zsh

The configuration files assume you have Zsh installed and robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh.

At the time of writing, Homebrew is a great way to install Zsh.

brew install zsh zsh-completions
chsh -s /bin/zsh

Clone the repository into home directory

This repository contains a .zshrc file, which you will want to override the default file created by Zsh. If you need to retain your existing .zshrc file, move it to a different spot:

cd ~
mv .zshrc .zshrc.pre-dotfiles

Next, ensure that your .dotfiles directory will be ignored by Git (to eliminate recursion issues) by adding to .gitignore:

touch .gitignore
echo ".dotfiles" >> .gitignore

Then, clone this repository into your home directory:

git clone --bare https://github.com/jwbaldwin/dotfiles.git $HOME/.dotfiles

Checkout the content of the repository into $HOME:

git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME checkout

If there are conflicts with existing files, Git will let you know like this:

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
    .gitconfig
Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.
Aborting

Be sure to back those up first before moving forward.

Restart your shell session to pick up all the new aliases and configurations.

Finish setup

You'll want to tell Git to ignore untracked files when running git status, since this repository will only manage certain hand-picked files in your home directory:

dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Committing new changes

Suppose you just made a change to your .zshrc file and would like to commit it to your dotfiles repo.

# See your proposed changes
dotfiles status

# Stage up your changes
dotfiles add .zshrc

# Commit it
dotfiles commit -m "Message goes here"

# Push it up
dotfiles push

You'll want to avoid running an "add all" command (like dotfiles add . or dotfiles add -A) since only some of the files in the home directory are tracked by Git.

Miscellanea

Managing Homebrew dependencies

Once directory is under git management, run the bootstrap script to perform additional environment setup (tap Homebrew bundle, install Zsh, etc.):

script/bootstrap

To install new Homebrew packages, add to the Brewfile, run brew bundle, and commit your changes.

Starting from scratch

To bring your existing home directory under version control, initialize a bare git repository there and define an alias to help with managing it:

git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles
alias dotfiles='/usr/local/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'
dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Be sure to add the alias to .zshrc, either manually or like this:

echo "alias dotfiles='/usr/local/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'" >> $HOME/.zshrc

Now, you can run ordinary git commands in your home directory using your newly created dotfiles alias:

dotfiles status
dotfiles add .zshrc
dotfiles commit -m "Add zshrc"
dotfiles push