Home directory and dotfiles management

In Linux you can customize your environment by creating custom aliases and various scripts. After some time this flexibility becomes difficult to managed if you work on many different machines. And if some of the hosts are cloud servers that are being deleted and recreated setting up your home directory can become a boring and annoying task.

Problem

How to customize and maintain your home directory config files on many servers.

Solution

1. Create a repository for your configs on github. You can track your config files in a repository like mine: dotfiles on github. There are many existing repositories that that you can clone or simply reuse.
2. On the server/cloud server install https://github.com/andsens/homeshick. This bash script will help us to maintain the config files.
3. Download your dotfiles (config files) repository on the server
4. Install it in your home directory
5. Add the customization to .bashrc file

	# (1) Example can be found here
	# https://github.com/rtomaszewski/dotfiles
	# (2)
	#alias homeshick="source $HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick/bin/homeshick.sh"
	git clone git://github.com/andsens/homeshick.git $HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick
	source $HOME/.homesick/repos/homeshick/homeshick.sh
	# (3)
	homeshick clone rtomaszewski/dotfiles
	# because we don't use 'home' directory in the dotfiles repository we use this workaround
	homeshick generate local
	homeshick cd local
	cd home
	find ../../../repos/dotfiles -maxdepth 1 ! -name .git -a ! -name dotfiles -exec ln -s {} . \;
	# (4)
	homeshick link
	# (5)
	cat $HOME/.mydotfiles >> $HOME/.bashrc

view raw install_dotfiles hosted with ❤ by GitHub

References

https://github.com/rtomaszewski/dotfiles
https://github.com/andsens/homeshick
http://dotfiles.github.io/