Bare Dotfiles: how to do "sparse checkouts" on Different Machines
⚠️ This post is still work-in-progress.
One of the most elegant approaches to managing “dotfiles” (configuration files for CLIs) is by using a bare git repository, to my knowledge first introduced by Nicola Paolucci on the Atlassian website. You should definitely read the short tutorial if you haven’t, but it basically advices you to create a bare repository and a shell alias to reference that repository:
$ git clone --bare "<repo_url>" ~/Documents/dotfiles
$ alias dot='git --git-dir="$HOME/Documents/dotfiles" --work-tree="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"'
Or for fish:
function dot
git --git-dir="$HOME/Documents/dotfiles" \
--work-tree="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME" $argv
end
Note: I’ve adapted the alias slightly to work just for $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
(usually ~/.config) as I like to keep my $HOME clean 1.
After the bare clone, no code is checked out yet. That means the work tree (our
config folder) is not touched yet. If we would continue the examples from the
blog post, we would checkout the main branch with dot checkout which would
possibly fail with the message that files could be overwritten.
To solve this problem, I recommend to create a new orphan branch:
$ dot switch --orphan "$(hostname)"
Now we have a branch with no parent (hence orphan) and gave it the name of the machine. Now, we can manually checkout configs we would like to use on this machine. If I for example only want to use my Neovim config on this machine:
$ dot restore -s main -- nvim
Note: this is the same as dot checkout main -- nvim.
Bonus: Ignore Local Config
You might have noticed that I don’t set showUntrackedFiles to false. This is
by design. I don’t want to forget to track config files of new CLIs. If I
really want to ignore them, I add them to Git’s local ignore file
$GIT_DIR/info/exclude. Here’s a Git alias I use for it:
$ dot config alias.exclude \
'!echo "${1?no argument}" >> $(git rev-parse --git-path info/exclude) && :'
Which allows me to ignore a single config:
$ dot exclude htop