5 ms·

Dotfiles.github.com - A guide to dotfiles on GitHub

122 points by netherland 14y ago

ComputerGuru 14y ago
(Obvious) disclaimer: this is a user-hosted subdomain on GitHub. It is not an official GitHub page (even if the logo is two octocats snuggling together).
- udp 14y ago
  Which means, of course, it's also a repository if anyone is interested: https://github.com/dotfiles/dotfiles.github.com/ https://github.com/dotfiles/dotfiles.github.com/
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ah- 14y ago
I've meant to finally put my dotfiles into a repository but the one thing keeping me from it is that I haven't yet stumbled upon a script to symlink everything into it's place that I'm totally satisfied with. I don't use ruby and don't want to install rake on each machine for something that should be possible with a simple shell script, and didn't like the scripts I saw so far. Everything had a medium or large aspect that kept me from using it. Maybe I just need to write my own thing.
- zheng 14y ago
  I would recommend it. I'm not fully happy yet with my setup, but it's all in bash, and fairly simple really. Plus, when you do it yourself you will understand everything you do, and be less likely to screw up something you didn't actually want changed.
- JoshTriplett 14y ago
  I highly recommend not symlinking things at all; just have the repository itself as your home directory. Whenever I set up a new machine, I always do this: git clone git://joshtriplett.org/git/home mv home/.git . rm -rf home git checkout -f (There probably exists a simpler way to do that, but I haven't found it yet.) I can always check out my repository via git:// even on a machine where I want to push to it, because my repository includes a ~/.gitconfig containing: [url "ssh://joshtriplett.org/"] pushInsteadOf = "git://joshtriplett.org/" So, I can automatically push as long as I have SSH access to my server. (I wrote the support for pushInsteadOf in upstream git, specifically to enable this use case.)
  - epe 14y ago
    I don't know if it's any simpler, but I tend to do: git init . git remote add origin git://github.com/eentzel/dotfiles.git git checkout -t origin master
- NeutronBoy 14y ago
  I just use a bash script that I add a line to symlink each config to the correct location. I really like this as I know exactly what's happening.
- jcurbo 14y ago
  I use homesick (which is written in Ruby) and I think I agree with you. I like the premise of having the repo in a subdirectory and symlinking the files in - I don't like to have the whole homedir in git - I only want certain things in the repo in the first place, not everything. Seems like the rest could be done in a shell script for maximum portability.
- adestefan 14y ago
  I use the dircombine perl script that has been used by Joey Hess since his first SVN home directory article was written. You can also look at the fixups scripts that uses dircombine to setup everything. It's simple and to the point. http://git.kitenet.net/?p=joey/home.git;a=blob_plain;f=bin/dircombine;hb=HEAD http://git.kitenet.net/?p=joey/home.git;a=blob_plain;f=bin/d...
- natep 14y ago
  I've been using justone's dfm (dotfile manager) script[1]. The only requirement is PERL 5.8, which is just about everywhere, I think. Seems good enough so far, but I'm not sure how I'll integrate Oh-My-Zsh 2.0[2] yet. Maybe someone can compare it to homesick or do a PERL port... [1] https://github.com/justone/dotfiles https://github.com/justone/dotfiles [2] https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/oh-my-zsh https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/oh-my-zsh
- sciurus 14y ago
  Your script can be pretty simple. E.G. Create symlinks when they don't exist and report errors if creating them would clobber something else: DOTFILES=$HOME/where/the/dotfiles/live/in/git for T in $DOTFILES/*; do TARGET=$(readlink -e $T) LINK_NAME=$($HOME/.$(basename $TARGET)) # test if a file, working symlink, or broken symlink already exists if [ -e $LINK_NAME -o -L $LING_NAME ]; then CURRENT_TARGET=$(readlink -m $LINK_NAME) if [ $CURRENT_TARGET != $TARGET ]; then echo "$LINK_NAME already exists and is really $CURRENT_TARGET" fi fi ln -s $TARGET $LINK_NAME done Remove stale dotfile symlinks: for L in $(find $HOME -maxdepth 1 -type l -name '.*'); do if [ ! -e $L ]; then rm $L; fi done This assumes you'll use git excludes to keep files you don't want out of your repository. E.G. if you don't want $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa in git then you'd have $DOTFILES/ssh/.gitignore with 'id_rsa' in it. If you try to manage your excludes through the linking you'll end up with a very ugly script like what I have at https://github.com/sciurus/dotfile_management https://github.com/sciurus/dotfile_management
AdamGibbins 14y ago
While we're on the subject - has anyone found a good way to separate environments while keeping your setup fairly DRY? e.g. I have slight variations in my aliases for work/home, different git config email etc. You can find mine here: http://github.com/adamgibbins/dotfiles http://github.com/adamgibbins/dotfiles
- sophacles 14y ago
  Towards that end, (and for keeping certain sensitive things from repos...) I made this: https://github.com/sophacles/dotfuse https://github.com/sophacles/dotfuse It is a fuse filesystem that allows for modularization of some "single file" style dotfiles. Combined with git branche or modules (or both) it can get a lot of this (i hope). Warning though, it is still a bit of a toy, and I haven't played with it for a while, but I'm open to suggestions and pull requests! As for dry with sourceable stuff, like bash/zsh configs, you can just keep the environment specific stuff in a separate repo, and use git modules, that is if your environ specific stuff needs to be confidential (or some of it) and kept in separate private repos.
  - mh- 14y ago
    this is clever, thanks for sharing
- apinstein 14y ago
  I see you have a zshrc.local; that's the same approach I use. Unfortunately not everything supports "includes" but many, many things do. If you want to see more, https://github.com/apinstein/dotfiles https://github.com/apinstein/dotfiles I suppose another alternative might be having a private ".local" repo as a submodule, and having a rake task to concatenate and install the shared & local files. It is a tricky problem.
  - AdamGibbins 14y ago
    My zshrc.local setup is rather poor and I need to find time to sort it out correctly - currently its effectively a clone of the standard grml setup (http://grml.org/zsh/ http://grml.org/zsh/).
lyime 14y ago
@github - Please make a font a bit darker.
- slikts 14y ago
  It's a user page, so not by github
rocktronica 14y ago
With respect, a guide to dotfiles should explain what dotfiles are.
- pbiggar 14y ago
  If someone needs to ask what dotfiles are, they aren't in the target audience of this project.
  - subpixel 14y ago
    I have to disagree - I had never heard the term before, but now that I see the power/convenience of a symlinked configuration, I'm interested in learning more. I'm sure many others like myself would appreciate a more thorough, introductory walkthrough. I'll be asking my more hard-core friends for guidance in the meantime.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
A Rakefile for dotfiles? Seriously?
- Plugawy 14y ago
  Why not? I've been using it without any problems. It's just easier to manage.
  - exDM69 14y ago
    Because not everyone has a Ruby development environment available. It would be a lot better idea to stick with Makefiles or other more commonly available Unix tools. A lot of Ruby people seem to add a Rakefile or a Ruby script to do some simple task like installing a few dotfiles. That makes them a lot less useful to me (for example), as I don't have a Ruby env available on all machines I use. Same goes for Node.js, Python and Perl people. If a "standard unix" tool can do something almost as easily as a Rakefile/whatever, you should probably stick to the standard tools. I don't know what you should do with Windows, though.
oacgnol 14y ago
I highly recommend using symlinks to synchronize dotfiles with a locally cloned repo. That way, you can make changes to the dotfiles sitting in your home directory and it'll be reflected in your repo should you want to commit those changes.
- mise 14y ago
  Wait, I've done it the other way around. I have a repo directory, and I created symlinks in ~/ pointing to the dotfiles in the repo. I have a simple install script to symlink the files. Would you suggest having the physical files in ~/ and adding their symlinks to a repo?
  - ichilton 14y ago
    I would think he meant what you said.... symlinks in the repo doesn't sound a good idea.
- uggedal 14y ago
  I just track ~/ directly and add appropriate .gitignore entries to those files which are ephemeral or not part of my local configuration: https://github.com/uggedal/dotfiles/blob/master/.gitignore https://github.com/uggedal/dotfiles/blob/master/.gitignore
seryl 14y ago
I use something relatively similar, but I do it with Chef. (shameless plug) Kindness: A nice way to bootstrap your box (with chef) http://joshtoft.com/kindness/ http://joshtoft.com/kindness/ It takes advantage of site-cookbooks with Chef, letting you bring in your own site-cookbooks and also takes your chef-solo.json (if it exists). I made it to get away from the rake dotfile sillyness.
tlvince 14y ago
A workaround to the "symlink farm" method is making use of "--config=PATH" options for most apps and setting up aliases. Conforming to the XDG base dir standard as much as possible makes sense but can get painful sometimes (e.g. vim: http://tlvince.com/2011/02/03/vim-respect-xdg/ http://tlvince.com/2011/02/03/vim-respect-xdg/).

122 points by netherland 14y ago

(Obvious) disclaimer: this is a user-hosted subdomain on GitHub. It is not an official GitHub page (even if the logo is two octocats snuggling together).

udp 14y ago
Which means, of course, it's also a repository if anyone is interested: https://github.com/dotfiles/dotfiles.github.com/ https://github.com/dotfiles/dotfiles.github.com/

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ah- 14y ago

I've meant to finally put my dotfiles into a repository but the one thing keeping me from it is that I haven't yet stumbled upon a script to symlink everything into it's place that I'm totally satisfied with. I don't use ruby and don't want to install rake on each machine for something that should be possible with a simple shell script, and didn't like the scripts I saw so far. Everything had a medium or large aspect that kept me from using it. Maybe I just need to write my own thing.

zheng 14y ago
I would recommend it. I'm not fully happy yet with my setup, but it's all in bash, and fairly simple really. Plus, when you do it yourself you will understand everything you do, and be less likely to screw up something you didn't actually want changed.
JoshTriplett 14y ago
I highly recommend not symlinking things at all; just have the repository itself as your home directory. Whenever I set up a new machine, I always do this: git clone git://joshtriplett.org/git/home mv home/.git . rm -rf home git checkout -f (There probably exists a simpler way to do that, but I haven't found it yet.) I can always check out my repository via git:// even on a machine where I want to push to it, because my repository includes a ~/.gitconfig containing: [url "ssh://joshtriplett.org/"] pushInsteadOf = "git://joshtriplett.org/" So, I can automatically push as long as I have SSH access to my server. (I wrote the support for pushInsteadOf in upstream git, specifically to enable this use case.)
- epe 14y ago
  I don't know if it's any simpler, but I tend to do: git init . git remote add origin git://github.com/eentzel/dotfiles.git git checkout -t origin master
NeutronBoy 14y ago
I just use a bash script that I add a line to symlink each config to the correct location. I really like this as I know exactly what's happening.
jcurbo 14y ago
I use homesick (which is written in Ruby) and I think I agree with you. I like the premise of having the repo in a subdirectory and symlinking the files in - I don't like to have the whole homedir in git - I only want certain things in the repo in the first place, not everything. Seems like the rest could be done in a shell script for maximum portability.
adestefan 14y ago
I use the dircombine perl script that has been used by Joey Hess since his first SVN home directory article was written. You can also look at the fixups scripts that uses dircombine to setup everything. It's simple and to the point. http://git.kitenet.net/?p=joey/home.git;a=blob_plain;f=bin/dircombine;hb=HEAD http://git.kitenet.net/?p=joey/home.git;a=blob_plain;f=bin/d...
natep 14y ago
I've been using justone's dfm (dotfile manager) script[1]. The only requirement is PERL 5.8, which is just about everywhere, I think. Seems good enough so far, but I'm not sure how I'll integrate Oh-My-Zsh 2.0[2] yet. Maybe someone can compare it to homesick or do a PERL port... [1] https://github.com/justone/dotfiles https://github.com/justone/dotfiles [2] https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/oh-my-zsh https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/oh-my-zsh
sciurus 14y ago
Your script can be pretty simple. E.G. Create symlinks when they don't exist and report errors if creating them would clobber something else: DOTFILES=$HOME/where/the/dotfiles/live/in/git for T in $DOTFILES/*; do TARGET=$(readlink -e $T) LINK_NAME=$($HOME/.$(basename $TARGET)) # test if a file, working symlink, or broken symlink already exists if [ -e $LINK_NAME -o -L $LING_NAME ]; then CURRENT_TARGET=$(readlink -m $LINK_NAME) if [ $CURRENT_TARGET != $TARGET ]; then echo "$LINK_NAME already exists and is really $CURRENT_TARGET" fi fi ln -s $TARGET $LINK_NAME done Remove stale dotfile symlinks: for L in $(find $HOME -maxdepth 1 -type l -name '.*'); do if [ ! -e $L ]; then rm $L; fi done This assumes you'll use git excludes to keep files you don't want out of your repository. E.G. if you don't want $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa in git then you'd have $DOTFILES/ssh/.gitignore with 'id_rsa' in it. If you try to manage your excludes through the linking you'll end up with a very ugly script like what I have at https://github.com/sciurus/dotfile_management https://github.com/sciurus/dotfile_management

AdamGibbins 14y ago

While we're on the subject - has anyone found a good way to separate environments while keeping your setup fairly DRY? e.g. I have slight variations in my aliases for work/home, different git config email etc. You can find mine here: http://github.com/adamgibbins/dotfiles http://github.com/adamgibbins/dotfiles

sophacles 14y ago
Towards that end, (and for keeping certain sensitive things from repos...) I made this: https://github.com/sophacles/dotfuse https://github.com/sophacles/dotfuse It is a fuse filesystem that allows for modularization of some "single file" style dotfiles. Combined with git branche or modules (or both) it can get a lot of this (i hope). Warning though, it is still a bit of a toy, and I haven't played with it for a while, but I'm open to suggestions and pull requests! As for dry with sourceable stuff, like bash/zsh configs, you can just keep the environment specific stuff in a separate repo, and use git modules, that is if your environ specific stuff needs to be confidential (or some of it) and kept in separate private repos.
- mh- 14y ago
  this is clever, thanks for sharing
apinstein 14y ago
I see you have a zshrc.local; that's the same approach I use. Unfortunately not everything supports "includes" but many, many things do. If you want to see more, https://github.com/apinstein/dotfiles https://github.com/apinstein/dotfiles I suppose another alternative might be having a private ".local" repo as a submodule, and having a rake task to concatenate and install the shared & local files. It is a tricky problem.
- AdamGibbins 14y ago
  My zshrc.local setup is rather poor and I need to find time to sort it out correctly - currently its effectively a clone of the standard grml setup (http://grml.org/zsh/ http://grml.org/zsh/).

lyime 14y ago

@github - Please make a font a bit darker.

slikts 14y ago
It's a user page, so not by github

rocktronica 14y ago

With respect, a guide to dotfiles should explain what dotfiles are.

pbiggar 14y ago
If someone needs to ask what dotfiles are, they aren't in the target audience of this project.
- subpixel 14y ago
  I have to disagree - I had never heard the term before, but now that I see the power/convenience of a symlinked configuration, I'm interested in learning more. I'm sure many others like myself would appreciate a more thorough, introductory walkthrough. I'll be asking my more hard-core friends for guidance in the meantime.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

A Rakefile for dotfiles? Seriously?

Plugawy 14y ago
Why not? I've been using it without any problems. It's just easier to manage.
- exDM69 14y ago
  Because not everyone has a Ruby development environment available. It would be a lot better idea to stick with Makefiles or other more commonly available Unix tools. A lot of Ruby people seem to add a Rakefile or a Ruby script to do some simple task like installing a few dotfiles. That makes them a lot less useful to me (for example), as I don't have a Ruby env available on all machines I use. Same goes for Node.js, Python and Perl people. If a "standard unix" tool can do something almost as easily as a Rakefile/whatever, you should probably stick to the standard tools. I don't know what you should do with Windows, though.

oacgnol 14y ago

I highly recommend using symlinks to synchronize dotfiles with a locally cloned repo. That way, you can make changes to the dotfiles sitting in your home directory and it'll be reflected in your repo should you want to commit those changes.

mise 14y ago
Wait, I've done it the other way around. I have a repo directory, and I created symlinks in ~/ pointing to the dotfiles in the repo. I have a simple install script to symlink the files. Would you suggest having the physical files in ~/ and adding their symlinks to a repo?
- ichilton 14y ago
  I would think he meant what you said.... symlinks in the repo doesn't sound a good idea.
uggedal 14y ago
I just track ~/ directly and add appropriate .gitignore entries to those files which are ephemeral or not part of my local configuration: https://github.com/uggedal/dotfiles/blob/master/.gitignore https://github.com/uggedal/dotfiles/blob/master/.gitignore

seryl 14y ago

I use something relatively similar, but I do it with Chef. (shameless plug) Kindness: A nice way to bootstrap your box (with chef) http://joshtoft.com/kindness/ http://joshtoft.com/kindness/ It takes advantage of site-cookbooks with Chef, letting you bring in your own site-cookbooks and also takes your chef-solo.json (if it exists). I made it to get away from the rake dotfile sillyness.

tlvince 14y ago

A workaround to the "symlink farm" method is making use of "--config=PATH" options for most apps and setting up aliases. Conforming to the XDG base dir standard as much as possible makes sense but can get painful sometimes (e.g. vim: http://tlvince.com/2011/02/03/vim-respect-xdg/ http://tlvince.com/2011/02/03/vim-respect-xdg/).