Dotfiles

For me, managing all of my dotfiles across my different computers used to be a difficult and time-consuming task. Using GNU Stow, I can now manage all of my dotfiles in a centralized directory. A centralized directory offers the convenience of:

• organizing my dotfiles into seperate directories, based on their function
• version-controlling my dotfiles on GitHub

For example, I have all my vim related dotfiles stored in a directory aptly named vim. This directory contains anything vim related, so that includes files like .vimrc, the .vim directory, etc. I have similar directories for zsh, bash, tmux, etc. Version-controlling is easily achieved by initializing the centralized dotfiles directory as a git repository, and pushing/pulling your changes via GitHub. This is very easy to do, as all of your dotfiles are now contained within one main directory.

Quick & Easy Setup

If you just want to use my setup, then just follow this setup. BE CAREFUL though, as if you perform these commands, your existing dotfiles will get overwritten with the ones in this repository. You can have stow prevent overriding files by running the commands below without the -R option (ex. stow -vt ~/ bash).

If you dont care about this, then here is the quick and simple way to get my setup:

cd path/to/dotfiles_repo
stow -vRt ~/ bash
stow -vRt ~/ zsh
...

You can repeat the stow command for any number of packages you want. Additionally, if you would like for stow to install the package under a different directory other than the home directory, then just replace the ~/ directory with the directory of your choice.

Cronjobs

The cron package contains one file called cronjobs. This file contains a list of jobs that I let cron schedule and run. Anytime I make a change to the cron/cronjobs file, or if I'm adding my dotfiles to a new computer, I run the following command to refresh my crontab:

crontab cron/cronjobs

Setting up your own stow-based dotfiles repository

Managing your own dotfiles using stow is also very easy:

1. Create a new directory to hold your dotfiles. I created one by doing mkdir ~/git/dotfiles.
2. Create a directory for each of the different dotfile types you plan on storing. For example, I plan to store and manage my vim, bash, and tmux dotfiles using stow, so I'll do mkdir ~/git/dotfiles/vim ~/git/dotfiles/bash ~/git/dotfiles/tmux. stow refers to each of these directories as a package. So ~/git/dotfiles/vim is really a stow package for your vim dotfiles.
3. Move all your dotfiles to the new directories that they belong in. For example, I'll be moving my .bashrc, .bash_profile, and .profile files into ~/git/dotfiles/bash/, and move my .vimrc and .vim directory into ~/git/dotfiles/vim/.
4. The next step involves using the magic of stow. MAKE SURE you are in your root dotfiles directory, which for me is ~/git/dotfiles. You should be able to see all of your packages by running ls. We'll use the vim package for this example. When you execute stow, what it will do is create symlinks to all the files and directories stored in the vim package in a pre-defined directory. In my vim package I have a vimrc file and a .vim directory containing a bunch of vim related files. Executing stow -vRt ~/ vim will create symlinks to .vimrc and .vim in the ~/ directory. The VIM editor can now reference my vim dotfiles, since it reads from ~/.vimrc, which points to my dotfiles directory. I can also edit ~/.vimrc as I normally would and have the changes appear in ~/git/dotfiles/vim.
5. After stowing all your packages, initialize your dotfiles repository as a git repository. For example, I will do git init ~/git/dotfiles. Create a repository on GitHub, or whatever hosting service you prefer, and set up yoru local dotfiles repository to point to the remote GitHub repository. Then commit and push your changes.
6. Now you can clone your GitHub dotfiles repository on your other computers. After cloning, just perform stow -vRt <target_dir> <package> on all your packages to bring over your dotfiles. BE CAREFUL as this will override any of your local dotfiles, so make sure you copy and save them to a safe location if you are at all worried about losing your old copies. Any time you make any dotfile changes on any of your computers, just commit and push, and then pull these changes on your other computers and restow the package. Very simple!

References

1. http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html?round=two