What are dotfiles?
Your dotfiles are the hidden files or folders that live in your home directory, for example your .vimrc and your .bashrc.
What do I mean by version?
By "version", I mean to track your dotfiles using a version control system, like git, and a hosting service, like Github.
Why would you want to version them?
Versioning your dotfiles allows you to track them and to be able to share them between computers, making it easy to provision a new computer.
Let's get started
There's a good chance that you arleady have some dotfiles, don't worry, it's easy to start tracking them. Our first order of business is to install a handy suite of tools called rcm, which abstracts the process of symlinking our dotfiles.
On macOS we would install via Homebrew.
$ brew install rcm
rcm expects a ~/.dotfiles directory, so let's create that and initialize our git repository.
$ mkdir ~/.dotfiles && cd ~/.dotfiles && git init
At this point, if you have any dotfiles (you probably do), you'll want to add them to your ~/.dotfiles directory, and for this, we use the mkrc tool provided by rcm.
$ mkrc .vimrc
$ mkrc .zshrc
$ mkrc .rubocop.yml
At this point, rcm has copied these files to your ~/.dotfiles directory with the dot stripped from the name (.vimrc -> vimrc) and replaced the copy in your home directory with a symlink to the new file in your ~/.dotfiles directory.
What about my vim plugins?
For most vim plugin managers, you are probably going to be cloning at least one git repository somewhere in your ~/.vim directory. If you don't plan on ever updating these repos, you can go ahead and run mkrc .vim.
If you want to be able to update these plugins (or any other tool you use which relies on a git repo), you'll need to use git submodules. I attempted to turn my existing vim plugins into submodules within my .dotfiles repository, but I wasn't successful. So instead of re-cloning each plugin as a submodule, I decided to switch to a vim plugin manager that doesn't require manually cloning repos.
I opted to start using vim-plug over pathogen, which requires less boilerplate and all of the configuration goes in your .vimrc.
Once I was done, the section of my .vimrc handling my vim plugins looked like so:
" Install vim-plug and plugins if vim-plug is not already installed
if empty(glob('~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim'))
silent !curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs
\ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim
autocmd VimEnter * PlugInstall --sync | source $MYVIMRC
endif
" Plugins
call plug#begin('~/.vim/bundle')
Plug 'slashmili/alchemist.vim'
Plug 'kien/ctrlp.vim'
Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline'
Plug 'tpope/vim-bundler'
Plug 'tpope/vim-dispatch'
Plug 'elixir-editors/vim-elixir'
Plug 'tpope/vim-endwise'
Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Plug 'airblade/vim-gitgutter'
Plug 'JamshedVesuna/vim-markdown-preview'
Plug 'tpope/vim-rails'
Plug 'tpope/vim-sensible'
Plug 'janko-m/vim-test'
Plug 'christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator'
call plug#end()
Yeah, but what about the submodules I can't avoid making?
Thought you might ask that, I encountered the same challenge. I use oh-my-zsh for zsh customizations (mostly the themes¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ), which relies on a git repository in your home directory .oh-my-zsh.
While I wasn't able to transfer the existing directory to my new .dotfiles directory, I was able to reclone it as a git submodule.
$ cd ~/.dotfiles
$ git submodule add -b master <repo url>
$ git submodule init # you should only have to run this the first time
$ rcup -v
The submodule is set up to track the master branch, has been cloned into your repository, and a symlink to your home directory has been made using the rcup tool provided by rcm.
If you wish to update it at any time, you only need to move into the directory of the submodule and do a git pull, followed by returning to the parent repository and committing the change.
Final Steps
Now that you have all of your dotfiles in a git repository, it's time to push that repository to Github and figure out how you are going to install these dotfiles the next time you are setting up a computer.
Provisioning a new machine with your dotfiles
This is the part we've been working towards, and thanks to our efforts, this part is a breeze.
# Install git if not installed
# Install rcm
$ git clone --recursive <url> ~/.dotfiles
$ rcup -v
Voila!
If you want to make it even easier to install, rcm provides a utlity to generate a standalone install script.
The rcup(1) tool can be used to generate a portable shell script. Instead of running a command such as ln(1) or rm(1), it will print the command to stdout. This is controlled with the -g flag. Note that this will generate a script to create an exact replica of the synchronization, including tags, host-specific files, and dotfiles directories.
env RCRC=/dev/null rcup -B 0 -g > install.shUsing the above command, you can now run install.sh to install (or re-install) your rc files. The install.sh script can be stored in your dotfiles directory, copied between computers, and so on.
Let's wrap up
If you've followed along and have made it this far, congratulations! You now have a backup of all of your configuration files!
If you started reading this, but thought, "Dang, I don't have any dotfiles to version, why am I reading this?", you're in luck! Since versioning one's dotfiles is a common practice, there are plenty of repositories out there for which you can choose to fork and start your own collection.
For example, if you were to checkout my dotfiles you would find a pretty basic setup for ruby and elixir development, along with helpful configurations for tmux and vim, which would be a good starting point if you didn't want to curate your dotfiles from scratch.