dotfiles

This repository holds an approach to modularizing Unix style configuration files, that traditionally are named in the pattern of .${PROGRAM}rc, and hence colloquially referred to as dot files.

The starting point is my personal need to make more sense of my various customizations of my bash environment across multiple computers.

Quickstart for bash

• git clone the dotfiles repo
• add these lines at the end of your .bash_profile:

export DOTFILES_HOME=$HOME/dotfiles
source $DOTFILES_HOME/bash/engine

• create a manifest for this machine / user
  • create file $DOTFILES_HOME/bash/.manifest (there is an example file)
  • OR create symbolic links in $DOTFILES_HOME/bash/.manifest.d/ to the modules in $DOTFILES_HOME/bash/lib/
• if necessary, create $DOTFILES_HOME/bash/.private (there is an example file)
• finally source $HOME/.bash_profile to enable your modularized configuration (or start a new login shell)

Sensitive data

If you have any sensitive information (e.g. API keys), put them in $DOTFILES_HOME/bash/.private. This file has been added to .gitignore, so it shouldn't get published by accident.

Machine / user specific data

If you have any machine and/or user specific information, i.e. this includes which modules you want/need to load, put them in $DOTFILES_HOME/bash/.manifest. This file has been added to .gitignore, so it shouldn't get published by accident.

Also a convenient way, is to just create symbolic links in $DOTFILES_HOME/bash/.manifest.d/ to the modules in $DOTFILES_HOME/bash/lib/.

If you want to create symlinks for all the modules, try this:

cd $DOTFILES_HOME/bash/.manifest.d/
for f in ../lib/*; do ln -s $f; done

Note: Both, the manifest file and the manifest directory will be processed! This allows you to have other machine specific stuff in .manifest, which is not just about loading modules.

Credits

This is inspired by and based on a blog post by Wyatt Andersen, and also his dot_files repo.