Your dotfiles are the project that you’ll work on for longest.

I spend a lot of my time using Vim, Bash, and various CLI tools. Over the past 15 years I’ve spent a lot of time configuring these tools, and I’ve gotten so used to my configuration that it’s really weird when I don’t have it. I use 6 machines on a regular basis (some with multiple accounts), so I need a way of managing those configuration files (typically known as dotfiles) and keeping them in sync between machines.

Configuration files aren’t much different to code, so the obvious way to maintain them is a Version Control System. I originally used CVS back in 2002 or so, then migrated to Subversion around 2007 (I think), and I’ve been using Git since 2010. The big difference between dotfiles and code is that dotfiles need to be in your home directory, not a subdirectory somewhere. One approach is to make your home directory into a VCS repository and configure the VCS to ignore everything you don’t want checked in, but that requires more maintenance than I’m happy with, and it possibly leaks information (e.g. if .gitignore contains bank-details.txt). The other approach is keep the checked out repository somewhere else and link all the files into your home directory - this is what I’m doing.

Start by creating a Git repository on a hosting service somewhere; I use https://github.com/, but others have recommended https://bitbucket.org/. Why use a hosted service? Because you want the repository to be easily available and you want someone else taking care of backups for you. I was very imaginative and named mine dotfiles :) Check out a copy of it somewhere; the tools I wrote assume it will be under ~/src and match *dotfiles*.

Now I need a tool to link the files in ~/src/dotfiles into your home directory. I couldn’t find one with a quick search back in 2010 (though now there appear to be many available), and I needed a project to learn Python after starting work in Google, so I wrote one: linkdirs. It’s one of the first pieces of Python I wrote and it wasn’t very good to start with, so a couple of years ago I wrote tests and improved it significantly - but even the first version was better than the ugly Perl code from 2002 it replaced. linkdirs is generic: it ignores various files associated with VCS systems, and Vim swap files, but you can use it for linking directories for other reasons. It links from multiple source directories, creates destination directories as necessary, ignores specific files if you want, and hard links files from source to destination. If a destination file exists but isn’t a hard link to the source file, it will check if the contents are the same; if they are it will delete the destination and create the hard link, otherwise it will display the diffs. If anything fails or there are diffs it will exit unsuccessfully.

linkdirs is pretty low level, so I wrote a wrapper: dotfiles. If finds all directories matching *dotfiles* directly under ~/src (so I can have a standard repository on every computer plus a work repository on work computers), runs linkdirs with the right arguments, and does some more things:

  1. cat "${HOME}"/.ssh/config-??-* > "${HOME}/.ssh/config"

    ssh doesn’t support multiple config files or includes, but I have standard configs and work configs in different repositories, so I keep the config snippets in separate files and combine them. This is done every time dotfiles runs - there’s nothing clever to check if an update is necessary.

  2. Add missing known_hosts entries to "${HOME}/.ssh/known_hosts".

    Again, ssh doesn’t support multiple known_hosts files, so multiple files need to be combined. Originally I just replaced known_hosts entirely, but that turned out to be a maintenance nightmare, e.g. machines getting different IP or IPv6 addresses.

  3. vim help tags from different plugins (see below) need to be updated, and spell files need to be compiled. I wrote a simple vim function for each (UpdateBundleHelptags and UpdateSpellFiles), and they’re both run every time by dotfiles.

Both linkdirs and dotfiles support reporting and deleting unexpected files in the destination directory, making it relatively easy to find or cleanup leftover files that I’ve deleted from the repository.

I use about 20 Vim plugins, and I manage each plugin as a git submodule, allowing me to easily update each plugin over time. Because I add and update plugins quite infrequently I’ve written instructions for myself in my .vimrc. I use vim-plug to manage Vim’s runtimepath, but I add the repositories manually because vim-plug doesn’t support submodules. I wrote update-dotfiles-and-bin-plugins to automate updating plugins, and I run it every 4 weeks to stay current so that I don’t need to deal with large diffs when I need a bug fix. It also runs install-extra-tools-for-vim to install extra tools needed by Vim plugins, mainly for Golang and Rust (tools for Python are installed differently, see Upgrading packages installed with pip3 is troublesome for details.

When I push a change to Github I later need to sync that change to every machine (normally the next time I use the machine, or when I notice that something is missing). This is simple but tedious, so I wrapped up the per-machine work in update-dotfiles-and-bin. That program checks for unexpected diffs, unexpected files, updates every bin and dotfiles repository, updates submodules if a newer version has been committed to my repository, pushes any local changes, and deletes any unexpected files.

I update all my home machines and users easily using update-dotfiles-and-bin-everywhere by using ssh to run update-dotfiles-and-bin.

A relatively rare action is setting up a new machine or a new user, but I also made that really simple: clone-dotfiles. Originally dotfiles was a shell function rather than a standalone tool, so clone-dotfiles was more complicated back then. When I use a new machine I clone my bin repository, run clone-dotfiles, and I’m ready to go.

Most of these tools are generic and can be reused by anyone, clone-dotfiles and update-dotfiles-and-bin-everywhere are the exceptions.