How to treat a local dotfile repository?

Question

As many others, I want to have a git repository with my configuration files and also upload a backup of it to a hosting site. My question is how to treat the dotfiles of the local repo.

Let's say that I have my zshrc/bashrc in the dotfiles repo. I can put the line 'source /path/to/local/repo/zshrc' to my ~/.zshrc file and everything's fine. Same thing with vimrc.

But what about those dotfiles that doesn't support such a command? Should I have the same content in both ~/.conffile and /pathtolocalrepo/conffile and when I make a change to one of them update the other file? Or is there a smarter way?

What's the common practice?

Also where this local repository is located usually (on Linux)? I don't think home folder is the right place to put it (config files should be available to other users too), but which place suits it best?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You should probably use symbolic links.

ln -s /path/to/repo/.zshrc ~/.zshrc

That means that when you try to access ~/.zshrc, this will instead look for the file /path/to/repo/.zshrc

For more infos on symbolic links, check this out : Symbolic Links

Note that you can perfectly create a "hard" link (without the -s option), only difference is that with hard links you cannot link directories nor link through filesystems (if /home and /path/to/repo are not on the same disk / partition)

Also where this local repository is located usually (on Linux)? I don't think home folder is the right place to put it (config files should be available to other users too), but which place suits it best?

I usually place all my git repositories in the ~/git folder but this really is a personal choice.

Answer 2

I do something similar, though for historical reasons I use CVS rather than Git.

I keep all my $HOME/.* files (and $HOME/bin/* scripts) in a CVS repository. I then manually use update-home and update-bin scripts that I've written to copy the files into $HOME or $HOME/bin, respectively. It's a little bit wasteful of space (I suppose I could use symlinks instead), but not badly so -- and by copying rather than symlinking, I can experiment with files in the repository without affecting my home directory.

The update-home command, among other things, makes backup copies of any files that already exist, so that I don't clobber the .bashrc file that was created when my account was set up. (And update-bin edits #! lines as needed, for example if I want to use a Perl executable other than /usr/bin/perl.)

(My update-home and update-bin scripts aren't designed to be usable by others; they're full of hardwired names that apply only to me. Just copying the files manually would work about as well.)

Answer 3

A common practice is to backup your dotfiles in github. There is a lot of work done for that practice.

The idea is to clone that repository for each new computer you want to use.

You can have a look to my personal repo to see how I implemented it. In my case I used a perl script called dfm to handle those symbolic links