Dotfiles under control

Recently I read a post about storing dotfiles in a git repository and I really liked some of the ideas. Inspired by the post I came up with a similar, very simple method for versioning my dotfiles, which I think is worth sharing.

I missed autocompletion of git command when using the method in the aforementioned post, so I prefer the method described in this post. What makes it elegant in my eyes:

• Very fast and simple setup
• No additional software required besides git
• Comfortable usage via alias git dotfiles

Note that this method is only meant to work for files within the home directory. In theory, it can also be used for system configuration files, but keep in mind that it can be dangerous. For example if you break your /etc/fstab, your system won't boot anymore.

Why bare?

We will be using a bare git repository to track our configurations. The naive way to track the files would be to use a normal repository with its root in the home directory. That approach however has the disadvantage that whenever you are in a non-git directory within your home directory, git will think it's working on your configuration repository. This is because whenever you run a normal git command, git traverses the directory tree until it finds a git work-tree. This behaviour can be confusing. You can find some explanation on what bare means by looking for --bare in these git docs.

Configuring repository with git alias

To initialize the repository run:

git init --bare ~/dotfiles.git

It creates a directory ~/dotfiles.git with a bare git repository, where the name dotfiles.git is arbitrary.

To be able to perform git operations on the configurations repo regardless of the current working directory, we will be using a git alias:

git config --global alias.dotfiles '!git --git-dir=$HOME/dotfiles.git/ --work-tree=$HOME'

You can choose the name of the alias (here dotfiles) as you like. The parameters git-dir and work-tree are set to the respective paths. Because we are using the $HOME environment variable, the preceding !git is required.

We configure our dotfiles-repository to not show untracked files, because most of the home directories content will not be under version control. Otherwise the output of git status would be cluttered.

git dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

And that's all we had to do. Now we can perform git commands like this:

git dotfiles add .gitconfig
git dotfiles commit -m 'Add gitconfig'

Since we are using a git alias, all commands (including other git aliases) will work as if using a normal git command, even autocompletion will be available. I hope you are exited as me about this simple method!