For a long time, I was searching for a simple way to keep my configurations somewhere easy to get. When I stumbled across some dotfiles repositories, I knew that I needed to create my own!

I came across multiple ways to save my dotfiles (git bare, stow, install script), but it looks like I prefer the git bare solution. I found out this very helpful video Git Bare Repository - A Better Way To Manage Dotfiles and followed along!

First of all, I started by installing git and creating some folders to keep my code and dotfiles in.

cd ~
sudo apt install git -y
mkdir -p  code/.dotfiles

Go to project location and install npm.

cd code/.dotfiles
sudo apt install npm -y

Generate a new SSH Key and add it to ssh agent (Generating a new SSH key and adding it to the ssh-agent).

npm install ssh-keygen
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "[email protected]"
eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Copy and add the ssh key to GitHub SSH keys (Adding a new SSH key to your GitHub account).

cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

As perfectly explained by the video, we need to create a git bare repository inside our dotfiles folder and then add an alias for config in our /.bashrc file. I also added a new line with a comment (#Custom) to know where my custom code starts.

git init --bare $HOME/code/.dotfiles
grep -qF "#Custom" $HOME/.bashrc || echo -e "\n#Custom"  >> $HOME/.bashrc
grep -qF "alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/code/.dotfiles --work-tree=$HOME'" $HOME/.bashrc || echo "alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/code/.dotfiles --work-tree=$HOME'" >> $HOME/.bashrc

This command hides the files that I'm not interested in.

config config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Add remote repository.

config remote add origin [email protected]:Maria-Papa/.dotfiles.git

Add .bashrc file, add commit message and push it to master. The first time the command config push --set-upstream origin master is needed, later we can use it as config push.

config add .bashrc
config commit -m "Add .bashrc"
config push --set-upstream origin master