A repository for syncing all of my dotfiles using GitHub and a super simple shell script.
To synchronize your own dotfiles on GitHub, first clone this repository (or copy setup.sh into a new fresh repo) and follow the instructions below.
- Clone the repository.
- For every dotfile (and folder) you with to sync, add them to the repository (include the
.). - Run
./setup.sh. The script will backup the dotfiles in your existing home directory into~/dotfiles_oldand then create symbolic links from your home directory to the dotfiles in the respository.
That's it! Now whenever you update a dotfile in the repository, just commit and push your changes. Then git pull on every other computer to keep them in sync.
For all other machines you wish to sync your dotfiles to, just clone the repository and run ./setup.sh once to set up the symlinks. In the future, git push and git pull to receive updates.
Making changes to dotfiles will not require you to run the script again, however, adding new dotfiles will require you to do so (in order to set up the new symbolic links).
The script works by iterating through all files (and folders) in the repository which start with ., and then creating a symbolic link of the same name inside your home directory ~ to the location of the file in the repository, e.g. ~/.bashrc -> dotfiles/.bashrc. The symbolic link simply points to the file's true location, and programs will traverse the symbolic link as if it were the actual file. Thus, changes to dotfiles/.bashrc also "update" ~/.bashrc. Note that supplementary files .git, .DS_STORE, and .osx are ignored automatically by the script.
You may need to chmod +x setup.sh if you get a Permission Denied error when running the shell script.
In bash, to re-load .bashrc configuration without logging out, run source ~/.bashrc.
The quickstart.sh script also included in this repository is a run-once script for setting up my complete devleoper environment on a new installation of Ubuntu. The script is responsible for installing software such as git, python, and emacs, generating an SSH key for GitHub, and synchronizing the dotfiles in this repository.
sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/theBrianCui/dotfiles/master/quickstart.sh && sudo chmod +x quickstart.sh && ./quickstart.sh