Overview

In Unix-based Operating Systems, we configure most applications with text-based configuration files (e.g. .tmux.conf for tmux, init.el for emacs). How to backup these text-based configuration files–the dotfiles–and restore them subsequently is an usual concern that I have.

In this post, I describe my system for backup and restoring my dotfiles.

I have three basic requirements for such a system:

  • it must allows me to quickly setup a new computer;
  • it has minimal dependencies;
  • it can be version controlled easily, ideally via git.

While these are relatively simple requirements, suprisingly, I was not able to find a good solution for a long time. Two solutions I have tried but did not work very well are:

  • the manual method: copy and paste the dotfiles to and fro Dropbox;
  • bare git repo method: see here.

Recently, I stumbled upon stow and found that it is the ideal solution. I will describe my dotfiles management system later, after briefly showing you how stow work.

How stow works

First we need to install stow with:

sudo apt install stow

Suppose you have the following file directory:

\home\hung
|-- dotfiles
   |-- app
     |-- .config
       |-- super_cool_app
         |-- config.file

If you change directory to dotfiles and run stow app:

cd ~/dotfiles
stow app

What happends is that all files in the folder app will be symlinked to the home directory /home/hung with the same folder structure. In this particular example, we will have a directory that look like this:

\home\hung
 |-- .config
   |-- super_cool_app
     |-- config.file

That all there is.

My dotfiles configuration system

My system relies entirely on stow.

I store all dotfiles in a folder called dotfiles in the HOME directory. For each application, I create a folder in dotfiles with the same name, and store all dotfiles of that application in this foler. Notice that these dotfiles have to be stored in the same folder structure as how they are used by the application. Then, suppose I want checkout the dotfiles for the application <app>, I just do:

cd ~\dotfiles && stow <app>  # <app> is emacs, vim, etc...

For my own dotfiles I create two shell scripts corresponding to two modes. In the scripts different stow commands are ran, depending on the particular mode. This structure also makes it trivial to version all dotfiles using git, backup and restore as you wish!

My own dotfiles live here [github.com/hungpham2511/dotfiles2]. Feel free to take a look.