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Dotfiles made easy

So you've decided to version-control your dotfiles, and you're looking for a way to do it for you, and all of a sudden you hit this snag. It's a pretty simple snag, but no one really seems to have a nice solution for it: symlink farms linking all your files into $HOME is ugly, but so is turning $HOME itself into a git repository annd having all your git metadata there (for example, ensuring that git commands will always fall back to acting on your dotfiles). :( If only there was some way to have the best of both worlds...

Enter dotfiles, a simple wrapper around git that runs all git commands with a custom $GIT_DIR, allowing metadata to be stored separate from the files. gitignore and gitattributes files can be easily hidden through the use of sparse checkout. A handful of administrative commands are also provided to bootstrap the repository.

Usage

  • dotfiles init /path/to/metadata

Initialize a new bare git repository, configured to treat $HOME as the worktree. $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout is seeded with .gitignore, .gitattributes, and README.md. $GIT_DIR/info/exclude is seeded with a gitignore file ignoring common types of uninteresting files. Configure git status to not list untracked files.

  • dotfiles clone protocol://domain.name/repo.git /path/to/metadata

Instead of init'ing a new repo, clone it from somewhere, and try to extract a usable gitignore/gitattributes and copy it to $GIT_DIR/info/. If it is possible to do so without overwriting, checkout all files too.

  • dotfiles ignore [PATTERN] ...

Append new patterns to $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, or directly edit it if no patterns are given. Then utilize the git plumbing to add the file contents to the index as .gitignore itself.

  • dotfiles attributes [ATTRIBUTES] ...

Append new gitattribute lines to $GIT_DIR/info/attributes and... well, you get the drill. :)

  • dotfiles readme

Edit your README.md in a temporary file so you can talk about what it does etc. Once again this is directly read into the index without actually manifesting in $HOME (because having some readme file in your home directory is cluttersome, but you still want it to show up on Github or wherever).

Encrypting secret files.

No especial effort has been taken to magically take care of files that should be synced, but not everyone should be able to read. I've found that I don't need to reinvent the wheel, as git-crypt works very well in that regard without extra effort. Simply add the following dotfiles attributes lines, then commit the secret files like any other:

[attr]crypt      filter=git-crypt diff=git-crypt

fileglob1        crypt
.bash_secrets    crypt
[...]

The git-crypt key will be stored in $GIT_DIR/git-crypt/ and can be exported and transferred separately.

Portability notes

/bin/sh with support for the local keyword is assumed. This is the default on systems where the default sh is: bash (macOS, most forms of Linux), busybox (embedded Linux), or ash/dash (Debian, BSD).

A readlink utility supporting GNU's -m option is assumed. If the GNU coreutils version is available via the name greadlink, for example on macOS via brew install coreutils, it will be preferred.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, or (at your option) any later version.