Store and manage dotfiles using git bare repo

Dotfiles are configuration files that are usually hidden and located in the home directory of a Unix-based system. These files can contain custom settings for your shell, editor, and other programs you use on a daily basis.

Using Git to manage your dotfiles provides several benefits. Firstly, it allows you to version control your configuration files, making it easy to track changes and revert to previous versions if needed. Secondly, it allows you to easily share your dotfiles across multiple machines, and even with others who use the same programs. Finally, it provides a simple and efficient way to backup and restore your configuration files in case of data loss.

There are several ways to use Git for managing dotfiles, but in this post, we will focus on using a Git bare repository. A bare repository is a Git repository that does not have a working directory, and only contains the Git data files. This makes it a great choice for managing dotfiles, as it allows you to keep your configuration files separate from your working directory.

The first step is to create a bare repository that will store your dotfiles. You can do this by running the following commands in your home directory:

git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles
git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

This will create a new bare repository in the .dotfiles directory in your home directory. And second command will set it to ignore the untracked files unless we add them explicitly

To make it easier to manage your dotfiles using Git, you can create an alias that will allow you to run Git commands from any directory. You can do this by adding the following line to your shell configuration file (.bashrc, .zshrc, etc.):

alias dotfiles='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'

This will create an alias called dotfiles that points to your bare repository.

Once you have created the bare repository, you can start adding your dotfiles to it. You can do this by running the following commands:

cd $HOME
dotfiles add .vimrc
dotfiles add .zshrc
dotfiles commit -m "Add vimrc and zshrc"

This will add your .vimrc and .zshrc files to the repository and create a new commit.

Now that you have set up your bare repository and created an alias, you can start managing your dotfiles using Git. For example, to add a new dotfile to the repository, you can run the following command:

dotfiles add .gitconfig
dotfiles commit -m "Add gitconfig"

This will add your .gitconfig file to the repository and create a new commit.

To push your changes to a remote repository, you can run the following command:

dotfiles push origin master

This will push your changes to the master branch of the remote repository.

Using a Git bare repository to manage your dotfiles provides an efficient and flexible way to version control, backup, and share your system configurations. By following the steps outlined in this post, you can easily set up a Git bare repository for your dotfiles and start managing them using Git.