🏰 My main (non-machine/non-environment specific) dotfiles castle –managed by Homeshick.

TL;DR

To bootstrap the dotfiles repository just run the following command, which will bootstrap the dotfiles using Homeshick dotfile manager. It will do the following:

• Clone Homeshick to the right place in your home
• Bootstrap this dotfiles castle

NOTE! Git is required to run the script. So check if it is installed first. If you run on MacOS just run: xcode-select --install. On Linux check your distribution. You can also install it via Brew.

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://gerardbosch.github.io/dotfiles/bootstrap.sh)"

You will be prompted for linking the newly downloaded dotfiles and mostly sure you will be prompted for overwriting some of the files like .bashrc, etc. You can make a backup first if you want or answer no and link them later with homeshick link dotfiles.

This repository uses Git submodules to host its dependencies.

THAT'S ALL! 😎

⭐ Related repos

• gerardbosch/dotfiles-linux – the complementary Linux-specific dotfiles.

What's included

My main personal 'dotfiles' castle, including some shell frameworks, Zsh configs, Zsh plugin manager, etc.

Dependencies shipped as Git submodules:

• bash-it (A ripoff oh-my-zsh for the Bash shell)

Why and how?

A few quotes:

Your home directory is your castle. Don't leave your dotfiles behind.

—Homesick.

In Unix, configuration files are king.

—HomeSHick.

version control systems do more than you think

—Dotbot (another dotfile manager)

So, VCS can do more than you think, just depending on how you use it. Submodules are an example of this.

When you organize your dotfiles properly it is easy to put them in a repository. This can be achieved by symlinking them to ~, and a dotfile manager can help here.

Adding new submodules

You can add to your dotfiles other projects that you want to bring always with you (like shell frameworks). Use a submodule for that. A convenience script is provided in ~/bin; just run:

add-castle-submod <castle> <URL>

• When you add a submodule, submodule's nested submodules (if any) are not initialized, so they remain empty. If you want/need to populate it:
  git submodule-update-rec --depth=1     # my own Git alias

Update submodules

Some of the submodules may update (pull) themselves automatically. But you can manually update one, or all submodules at once:

# Pull all submodules from its remotes
git submodule-pull --depth=1   # my Git alias for `git submodule update --init --remote`
git add . && git commit -m "Update all submodules from its remotes."

Now, superproject's records store the last commit of each submodule.

• In case the pulling of the submodule introduced a new submodule inside, the latter won't be initialized yet, and you will require an additional step after the commit:
  git submodule-update-rec --depth=1     # my own Git alias

• Note: You could be interested in doing the following before submodule-update-rec:

# (Just in case) sync submodule metadata (URL): Updates all SUBMODULE/.git/config
#   according to .gitmodules (remote URL could change, but not usually happen)
git submodule sync --quiet --recursive

Extra

With Homeshick you can handle multiple castles, this one is for main dotfiles, but you can have additional castles with machine/environment specific stuff and place them in different repositories that could be private, e.g. home or work specific files.

You can create for example a dotfiles-local repository and use Git branches to segment stuff (branch home, branch work, branch server) for different settings, or separate dedicated repos.

Links of interest

• Homeshick: Shallow symlinking

• Automatically install or update dotfiles when ssh'ing into a remote machine(or: let my dotfiles follow me)