3 ms·

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

by 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

by ah- 14y ago

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