Manage Your Settings with Git

Git is not only for controlling the code you write; it is also a great tool for managing and storing your config files. These files, usually found in your home directory, are called config files. Since we don’t want to put the entire home directory into a repository, we can use something called a bare git repository.

Initial setup

First, let’s create a bare git repository:

git init --bare $HOME/.dotfiles

With this bare repository, we need to determine the git directory and our working tree. This can be done by adding an alias to your .gitconfig file.

git config --global alias.dotfiles '!git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'

Now we can simply write it like this:

git dotfiles <git command>

for example:

git dotfiles status

When we query as above, git will show us all the untracked files in the home directory. To prevent this, we can write:

git dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Now it will only show the files we add to the repository. Let’s add our .gitconfig file first:

git dotfiles add .gitconfig
git dotfiles commit -m ".gitconfig file added" -a

Now let’s add our remote repository:

git dotfiles remote add origin <remote repo>
# an example with my remote repo
git dotfiles remote add origin git@github.com:eminboydak/.dotfiles.git

and send our first commit:

git dotfiles push

Now you can add all the settings files you want.

Syncing settings across devices

You can now use the remote repository to sync your settings across many devices. On a new device, you can simply clone the remote repository:

git clone --bare <remote repo> $HOME/.dotfiles

Once you’re sure you no longer need the old settings, to ignore them:

git reset --hard

and overwrite the current files in the home directory (make sure you back up your old settings first if you want to keep them):

git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME pull