Publishing dotfiles

I’ve saved my main configuration files since years either on my NAS or on a git repository off site somewhere on the internet. I used Github for this (as many others did) but I started my own instance of Gitea when I created my own Mastodon instance at the end of 2022. I closed down both of them, my git repos moved over to Codeberg and because I used Cloudflare before I actually wanted to use Codeberg pages in the first place, but I went the rsync way. I now have a pre-push hook in my git repository of my website that rsyncs my hugo made website to my webserver… But we should stay on topic here…

tl;dr I do have my dotfiles in a git repository on codeberg.org and I created the repository like:

First of all, create an empty directory in your home directory – I prefer a hidden one, so I’ll go for .cfg for now.

$ git init --bare $HOME/.cfg

An alias around git with specific worktree and git directory comes in handy at this moment. You can also create a function, this is totally up to you.

I got a function in my zsh configuration and an alias in my fish configuration.

In my .zaliases file there is something like this:

__is_available git && [[ -d ~/.cfg ]] \
&& function aconf {
  git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME $@
}

__is_available is another function that checks if a program is installed. My fish configuration looks like this:

if type -q git; and test -d ~/.cfg
  # function aconf --description "Add files to dotfiles repo"
    alias aconf="git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME $argv"
  # end
end

Note, I had this as a function before (hence the comments (#)), but I wanted to try this as an alias only at the moment. I won’t update this post if I may change this back again.

Running aconf status in $HOME would print a huge list of files, we don’t want that (well, I do sometimes switch it on again to have a look at files or dirs that I may have missed to add) and we can ignore these untracked files with:

$ aconf config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

If you want these files shown again, set it to normal.