Install the dotfiles onto a new system

If you already store your configuration/dotfiles in a Git repository, on a new system you can migrate to this setup with the following steps:

• Prior to the installation make sure you have committed the alias to your .bashrc or .zshrc:

alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'
source your .bashrc or .zshrc

• And that your source repository ignores the folder where you'll clone it, so that you don't create weird recursion problems:

cd ~
echo ".dotfiles" >> .gitignore

• Now clone your dotfiles into a bare repository in a "dot" folder of your $HOME:

git clone --bare <git-repo-url> $HOME/.dotfiles

• Checkout the actual content from the bare repository to your $HOME:

config checkout

• The step above might fail with a message like:

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
    .bashrc
    .gitignore
Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.
Aborting

This is because your $HOME folder might already have some stock configuration files which would be overwritten by Git. The solution is simple: back up the files if you care about them, remove them if you don't care. Here is a rough shortcut to move all the offending files automatically to a backup folder:

mkdir -p .config-backup && \
config checkout 2>&1 | egrep "\s+\." | awk {'print $1'} | \
xargs -I{} mv {} .config-backup/{}

• Re-run the check out if you had problems:

config checkout

• Set the flag showUntrackedFiles to no on this specific (local) repository:

config config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

• You're done, from now on you can now type config commands to add and update your dotfiles:

config status
config add .vimrc
config commit -m "Add vimrc"
config add .bashrc
config commit -m "Add bashrc"
config push