Dotfiles Management using Git Bare Repositories

Photo by Roman Synkevych 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

If you have been using Linux for a while, you may have tried ‘distro hopping’. After some time, it begins to be a pain as you try to configure your new distro just the way you like it. If you’re like me who has a ton of applications installed, you’ll relate to having hours or even days spent crafting your system to your liking.

I have stumbled upon a video by Distrotube showing how he manages his dotfiles using a git bare repository and I have decided to try it our myself.

Why use git bare?

Here are some advantages in using this technique.

1. No extra tools required!
2. You only need git for this to work. Since git is pretty much installed by default in most distros, you’d be pretty much set-up already.
3. No need to deal with symlinks.
4. One way you can control your dotfiles is if you place them in a folder and send out symlinks to the correct places where your dotfiles are expected to be placed. This is a bit cumbersome especially if you have a lot of configuration files to handle. You can most certainly set up a script to do this for you though.
5. Your files are placed in version control.
6. You can track changes made in your dotfiles, use different branches if you want to try out a completely different configuration, clone your dotfiles to a new machine or a new installation to replicate what you have in another system, and revert back to a previous configuration. This is all built-in with git.

How does this work?

This is pretty much how you would use git. You can use the same commands for adding files, removing files, staging, committing, and pushing them to a remote repository.

What’s different is that we’ll be using a Git bare repository. This is basically like the .git hidden directory in your normal git repositories. An alias will be used in order for our commands so that it will not interfere with any other local git repositories.

Getting started

We’ll start by initializing a git bare repository.

git init --bare $HOME/.cfg

Change .cfg to any name you wish. This is just an arbitrary name for our repository.

Define an alias for the command. You can also use any other alias that you would want. This is for brevity only. We don’t want typing lengthy commands everytime!

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

Run this next command to hide all files that we are not explicitly keeping track of.

config config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Add the alias to your .bashrc or .zshrc or config.fish for convenience. You can also run this command to save you time.

echo "alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME'" >> $HOME/.bashrc

And that’s it! You have successfully set up your git bare repository. You can pass git commands to your alias and add your dotfiles and other configurations. Of course, this is not limited to just dotfiles. You can add all kinds of files and directories here.

config status  
config add .bashrc  
config commit -m "Add bashrc"  
config push

Cloning your previous configurations to your new installation

So you have decided to do a clean install of your operating system and you want to have it configured fast. Your git repository is here and ready to settle in your new system.

Set up your alias before starting. You may just type it in your terminal or add it to your .bashrc, .zshrc, config.fish.

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

Add your git bare repository to a .gitignore file. This will help you avoid any recursion problems.

echo ".cfg" >> .gitignore

Again, .cfg is an arbitrary directory name. You can use any folder name you wish.

You’re now ready to clone your dotfiles into a git bare repository. Take note that you will need to use your the directory you specified in the previous step, replacing the .cfg directory in this command.

git clone --bare <git-repo-url> $HOME/.cfg

Make sure that your alias is defined in your current shell scope. If you have the alias in your .bashrc, .zshrc, or config.fish, you may need to source them again for the alias to take effect.

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

OR

source .bashrc

Checkout the contents of your bare repository to your $HOME directory.

config checkout

Of course, this command might fail as you might have similarly named files already in your new installation. You may see errors such as the one below.

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:  
    .bashrc  
    .gitignore  
Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.  
Aborting

There is a solution mentioned in an article in Atlassian written by @durdn. It involves backing up the files using a shell script. I think this is an elegant and efficient way for backing up files causing the checkout error.

mkdir -p .config-backup && \\\\ 
config checkout 2>&1 | egrep "\\\\s+\\\\." | awk {'print $1'} | \\\\  
xargs -I{} mv {} .config-backup/{}

After running the above, run the checkout command again.

config checkout

Once you run config status, you may see a lot of untracked files again. Let’s set the showUntrackedStatus flag to noagain so we’ll only see files which we only explicitly track.

config config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Your set up is now complete and you can now add and update files using your config alias and git commands.

config status  
config add .bashrc  
config commit -m "Add bashrc"  
config push

This setup may be a bit confusing at first but once you get the hang of it, then you’ll see how simple it really is.