Keep your dotfiles in git

What are dot files

• Dot files are hidden files. You have configured a lot of your own settings, configurations, or themes within dotfiles. Following are some example dot files

~/.vimrc 
~/.bashrc
~/.bash_profile
~/.zshrc

Purpose of keeping dot files in git

• When you switching between machines(for example move to new machine) it can be difficult to keep your configuration files synchronized across them

• One solution is to put your dot files under version control

• By storing your dotfiles in a Git repository, you’ll be able to use them on any OS X or Linux machine with Internet access

• In this example I'm gonna keep my .bash_profile and .zshrc in git repository in github.

How to do that??

• Create folder call ~/.dotfiles in your home directory (its a hidden directory)

mkdir ~/.dotfiles

• Move your ~/.bash_profile and ~/.zshrc files to ~/.dotfiles

mv ~/.bash_profile ~/.dotfiles/bash_profile
mv ~/.zshrc ~/.dotfiles/zshrc

Note that the files in ~/.dotfiles directory are not hidden(not with . prefix )

• Create symlinks to moved files

ln -s ~/.dotfiles/zshrc ~/.zshrc
ln -s ~/.dotfiles/bash_profile ~/.bash_profile

• Create github repository(In my scenario I have created repo name dotfiles). After creating the repository, github direct you how to push files to it

• According to the instructions I have made my local ~/.dotfiles directory as a git repository and commit the changes

cd ~/.dotfiles
git init
git add bash_profile
git add zshrc
git commit -m "initial dot files"

• Configure your git remote configurations in your local git repository and push the changes to the github

git remote add origin https://github.com/erangaeb/dotfiles.git
git push -u origin master

• You are done :) .. you can add more configuration files to .dotfiles directory and keep them in github

This is my github repository - https://github.com/erangaeb/dotfiles

Install your dot files in another machine

• Once your configuration files(dot files) is under version control, it’s quite straightforward to import your settings to any machine that has git installed

• I have added the instruction in README file

Installation

    git clone https://github.com/erangaeb/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles


Create symlinks

    ln -s ~/.dotfiles/zshrc ~/.zshrc
    ln -s ~/.dotfiles/bash_profile ~/.bash_profile