Syncing Dotfiles in Git

One of the greatest joys of working in a Unix environment is the ability to tailor application settings exactly to your liking. However, it can equally be a pain to work on a machine without any of the keybinds and plugins you've become so accustomed to. Syncing your dotfiles across machines using git is an easy way to ensure maximum productivity wherever you work.

Setup

To create an online repository based on the setting of one machine, first set up a git repository in home directory of that machine:

$ cd
$ git init

In order to make git ignore everything that isn't a dotfile, we make use of the .gitignore file. By adding a single wildcard (asterisk) to that file, git will be default ignore all files:

$ echo "*" >> ~/.gitignore
$ git add .gitignore

then, we force add all of the files we want to sync:

$ git add -f .vimrc

To add whole folders, I find it easiest to cd into them and run:

$ git add -f .

When you've added all the files you wish, add the remote repo and push your files:

$ git remote add origin https://github.com/youruser/dotfiles.git
$ git push origin master

Sync a System with Git for the First Time:

git clone won't work as git needs to clone into an empty directory, which the home directory will invariably not be.

Instead, initialize a git repo in the home directory:

$ cd
$ git init

Then, remote add the origin repository (on github in this case)

$ git remote add origin https://github.com/youruser/dotfiles.git

Fetch the files from the origin repository

$ git fetch --all

Then, reset the current branch to what has just been fetched. 'Git reset' resets the master branch to what's been fetched. The --hard option changes all the files in the working tree to match the files in origin/master."

$ git reset --hard origin/master

This method is preferable to a git pull, as a pull will not overwrite untracked local files, in the event that any local dotfiles will be overwritten by syncing with git.

Add New Changes

To add new changes you've made on any machine, the procedure is the same as with a normal git project, but with the -f flag as above:

$ git add -f .Xresources
$ git commit -m 'updated colorscheme'
(first time) $ git push origin master
(thereafter) $ git push

Keeping up to Date

In order to keep up to date, a simple git pull will suffice. You may consider put this into a login script or cron job to keep things current automatically.