Git Bare Repository - A Better Way To Manage Dotfiles 

Lmao i used to tar these files and upload then onto mega like every week xD

imo you should retitle this video That the clone is bare isn't really important here-- all it means is that wherever you clone (or initialize) it, Git will store all the repo metadata but not check out any version of the contents of the repo in that directory. The real workhorse here is the git-worktree feature, and you can use it with any repo to create a working tree in another directory, and you can have as many of them as you want.

New to github and using git to manage my dotfiles, suckless builds, etc... basically the stuff I’m tired of making from scratch each time I move to a new system. 😂 I’ve had to watch this video a few times to really understand how this is working.. Now that I understand I just have to say this is the most elegant and clean solution I’ve seen. Much better than GNU/stow or traditional methods. Excited to soon be living in a world where I can git-clone a github repo on a brand new system and have everything be how I like it, from window manager to vim rc. Thanks for this video. Really appreciate what you’re doing @distrotube 🙏🏻 Also- my dads side of the family all lives in West Monroe. He has a house out there on the same land as his brother and step-dad. Beautiful place. I like it much more there than So Cal.

Awesome! I was just about to restart my dotfiles and was already dreading the symlinking management I would have. Thank you!!!

Thanks for putting together this video! I read that article, and then searched on RU-vid to see if someone could explain it better. Showing the normal repo and bare repo side by side was what I was looking for. Your explanation, and walking through actually using it made it make sense!

I am always learning something new every time I watch your show! Also, congratulations on your Saints winning on Sunday!

I'm still coming back to this video to remember how to do this on new machines. The information presented here is invaluable. Thank you so much!

DT , you should do a video on ' etckeeper ' straight from the default repos. A VCS for all of your etc config files , it keeps logs of all changes and it has its own set of commands which are actually very similar to git's. Its more automated , every time you update whether its APT or Pacman it lets you know all of the changes being logged in the output.

My .vimrc file has become one of the most valuable and irreplaceable files on my computer and having a backup is essential. I've have a really inefficient git backup setup currently, but this video is exactly what I've been looking for for months. Excited to implement it. Especially now that I started using linux and I'm creating even more valuable/ irreplaceable dot files.

thanks a lot! I knew there would be a solution like this. For some reason, I made my dotfile repos in the same way as it were in the home directory, having each filesin their corresponding directory folders and whatnot. surprisingly, after applying what you showed in your video, cloning from my repo was a breeze, and everything just fits perfectly after cloning! and it was indeed a hassle symlinking each one of them from their corresponding folder. but then I knew this can be done, which is indeed better than my first option, which is to turn the entire home directory as a git repo, which would be a hassle. I never knew this option can be done! really helped a lot!

Tip: use 'exec bash' or 'exec zsh' as it works better than just sourcing the .bashrc .zshrc or launching a new instance of the shell within a shell. Especially if you are doing it a lot as you build your dotfiles.

Yeah this method is really awesome, I use it for some time now. Can't live without it.

Thanks a bunch. Excellent way to manage dotfiles. I'm quite good at git but i didn't know you could use it like this so much better than symlinking everything

Great video. Would have liked to have seen you sync a few Dev machines off the bare repo - especially with different OS (folder locations)

Wow, this tutorial is very self-explanatory and very informational. Thank you sooo much! :)

Excellent explanation, and a big thanks for referencing back to the Atlassian article. Love your content!

I think this is the cleanest way to do this task. The neat part is that one can track dotfiles in root or nested folders at the same time.

Nice. Well-edited and informed Linux content that’s useful for both new and experienced Linux users. Surprisingly rare on RU-vid. Thank you!!

but how would you clone in it in a fresh system?

This video is excellent, by far this is my favorite method to manage dotfiles

This is the most convenient method I've seen so far. Great video!

Really cool of you to credit the author of the article you got the idea from, respect!

Just had my bare dotfiles repo. DT you're awesome. Thanks man

that's a VERY nifty trick! what I've been doing with my dotfiles repo is add an init script that would create symlinks and load my submodules. What I call submodules is separate dotfiles repos (I have one for Personal, Work and OS-Specific)

NICE! This is so, so much easier. Thank you!

Thanks DT! just set one of these up in my shiny new GitLab account!!!

Thank you, I will start using this method myself.

Damn, this is actually really cool

Very useful, thanks DT.

Pretty handy. Saved it in a playlist for future reference.

Thank you very much. Amazing video!

Very useful and convinient. Thank you.

It's just the, bare repository, the simple bare repository, forget about your worries and your strife

Thanks, perhaps a little more information was needed for newbies to get their dotfiles published. I used dotfiles as my alias because "dotfiles status" makes a lot more sense than "config status"

RU-vid kept recommending me your videos and I enjoyed them a lot so far, so I just subscribed ;-)

Greatly explained!

It's really cool solution! Thank you man! I know want I going to do tomorrow morning;)

Thanks!!! Great solution for me.

This is super helpful and useful, thanks!

Thanks for this. I'd be doing mine the same as you with symlinks. I set my dotfiles up like this, and I have to say after some getting use to I really like it allot better. I like that all of the config file directory structure is preserved in the remote branch. That will make things allot less hassle when installing to another computer, or refreshing my own computer.

I have taken to the symlink method however I automated it. In my "dotfiles" folder (which I actually just call "home" I replicate the folder structure for every tracked config file and I have a bash script in the root of my repo that searches through reporoot/home/ and symlinks it into place to my actual home (creating directories if they dont exist).

Thanks! Still valid! works for me!

That could be very useful. Thanks for the video.

One downside I found with this method: you can't add a README file without having said file sitting in your home directory. Otherwise this is 100% the lowest-friction "dotfiles repo" setup I've heard of, and I can't see myself going back to another method.

Great timing for me! Yesterday I had just begun to version my dotfiles. The solution I had found was to create a git repositorie in my user's home directory and a .gitignore to ignore all files (*). Then, I whitelisted (!) only the config files I wanted. It worked, but it got a little complicated to mess around with .gitignore when I got into folder structures (like things inside .config, in witch there were files I wanted to version, and files I didn't, in diferent folders and diferent levels). And of course, anything outside of the user's home directory would be out of versioning or in a simbolic link mess. Glad you showed this solution, much more elegant indeed! Will be using it instead.

What a cool use case you 👌🏻, wonderful 😀 🙏🏻

This method is super legendary. Thanks DT otherwise I will have a gitignore file with tones of thing in that

Great, really interesting alternative! Btw, you can clean terminal with Ctrl+l, it's a bit faster :)

This has blown my mind, and was posted 4 years ago. Bruhh, how I don´t have seem that before

Thanks for this; it is an elegant solution like you mention. I don't know what I am missing, but when I move to a directory, I can commit a file added, get a message: "Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main .'nothing to commit (use -u to show untracked files)."

Very nice, great tip.

Jaw on the floor. /me Going to redo my dotfiles repo... Thanks, DT!

This is brilliant! 🎉

hey DT I love your videos and am using this method since you posted about it. Is there a way to use the same bare repository, but use and update just specific files in different systems? My use case: I use Arch Linux on my personal computer, but have a Macbook for work. So, I don't need all my dotfiles from my Arch config, but just some like `.vimrc`, `.zshrc` etc.

Great explanation as always. If you got around to recording a video about etckeeper, that would be also much appreciated.

I just gitignore every file with "*" and then use git add -f with each file I want to track.

Hey, DT! do you think it's possible to bring this to a bigger scale ? I mean, what if we make git bare repository for the whole system on empty , freshly installed distro and call it main, then we can create another branch and call it kde, install and configure kde afterwards , and commit changes to kde branch , and then again we go checkout our main branch, and do the same for , say , dwm, or i3 , or xfce even. See where I'm going with this ? Or how about we use another branch and call it thinkpad-x201, on a fresh arch linux install, then we configure everything we need for this machine (media keys, stylus support (if any) , fingerprint sensor, hibernation and so on) , we can then checkout main branch on another machine , say thinkpad-x61 , and do the same, now we made our selves custom distro, may i say, that can be used on any of our machines, and we can just install official distro on any machine as always , install just git and then clone our custom distro repository , and that's it , no more messing around with different distros, desktop environments (we all know how messy it becomes if you have more than one DE), you just install your favorite distro , as usual , and use your own configuration of that, suitable for current machine and god knows what else you can do with it, and more over, it's a back up system for your whole system , out of the box ! imagine installing some program that can make serious changes to your system ( not so hard to imagine having AUR under your hand , huh) , you prepare a commit -m "restore point: before installing dangerous software" , you install the software , your system crashes , as it should , but , you just boot from some live linux usb , or if it's just GUI, or graphics that failed we can do it even without live usb, chroot to your system , and roll back to your previous commit , boom this house is clear! Any way, why am I even writing this ? Well , I see the possibility but I'm not quite sure how to do this. Any chance you can get involved, or advise on this, what so ever ?

Chezmoi is my go-to. Templating and ability to run scripts. Control any file by chezmoi add and begin templating or tracking in one repo, but anything directory can be controlled

Awesome solution, thx

I am new to this channel. What distro you are using and terminal you are using to look fancy ? ThankX

Great video but I spent hours trying to figure out how to push this to remote github repo 😄 had some issue with branch names and understanding the whole process in general

This seems like a great new thing to try out! However, I'm confused as to how one would go about setting up a new machine if they were to reuse the same dotfiles. Would they not have to do any moving / copying / symlinking?

You can even create different branches for different rices / profiles

I prefer using the "ba-bam+bp" workflow for adding dotfiles, essentially instead of the alias being "config" I've set it to "b" for the git bare command in the video, "ba" for "(git bare) add" to add tracking to any new files, and "bam" for "(git bare) commit -am" then "bp" for "git Bare) push"

Wow, that's dope

I think I still prefer dotbot but I'll give this a look. I am not sure this solution will be as flexible as I need it to be. Using the settings.json example you provided, Iwould have no idea what that file pertained to if I didn't put it in the commit message; seems way better to just have dotfiles/config//settings.json -> ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}//settings.json by just adding an entry for it into install.config.yaml and running dotbot-install.

How would you add a readme to the new dotfiles repo? It is not part of the dotfiles but also necessary to document how to setup certain dependencies

I ended up calling my alias 'dgit' because it's shorter and more descriptive.

What would the process be for a fresh install, would cloning the repo put the dotfiles in the correct directories?

I may have just spent a day writing a script to do all the sync... The good thing is I learned bash.

For those on Windows, setting an alias might not work. I found you can instead make a custom function like the following: function config { git --git-dir=$HOME/dotfiles --work-tree=$HOME $args }

you should really also try etckeeper. BTW I tried dotbare but in the end, I just use a standard git repo in my home dir. No downfalls and better integration with existing tools

Actually you can 'source .bashrc' instead of relaunching shell And at the end, just setup a ssh key and add remote, so that you can push in 1 command

The drawback of this method is that you can not access the `diff` of your dotfiles locally. That is only possible after commit and push the modifications to the remote repository.

Great stuff DT! I took it a step further by adding a line to my nightly cron jobs to automatically look for changes and push. Nicely done! "config commit -a -m "nightly" && config push github.com/MY_NAME/MY_REPO.git"

By the way, you can create git alias instead of bash: git config --global alias.config="--git-dir=$HOME/dotfiles --work-tree=$HOME"

Hello DT, I am having trouble using this approach with pugin directories of vim and .emacs.d directories from Doom Emacs, which are considered github repositories themselves. As a newbie, how can I solve that, since you are having those files in your repository? Thank you for any help with this. Regards, Thomas

Thanks for this. I stupidly copied all of your shell color script files into /bin and overwrote pacman.

the bare repository doesn't mean anything, if your existing repo was created without the `--bare` flag and is named "dotfiles" you can repeat this trick by aliasing `git --git-dir=$HOME/dotfiles/.git ...`. the real focus should be on the `--work-tree` flag which I would actually set to $PWD, that way you can add configuration files from all over the place, like in ~/.config, without adjusting the alias at all

I like this approach, but how would you handle scripts that install a set of applications? In a separate directory called e.g. `.setup`?

I'm not sure if I am just missing something or what. It's probably due to me not being as familiar with git as I should be. When I go to run "config push" it throws the following: fatal: No configured push destination. Either specify the URL from the command-line or configure a remote repository using git remote add and then push using the remote name git push

THIS IS A GAME CHANGER!!!!!!

I have a question, I backup up everything I needed and then distrohopped. How do I clone the repository so that it has the same functionalities? i.e. I can "config add x.file" and it will work perfectly. The only way I managed to do it was deleting the repo and following the tutorial again.

I did this, then cloned my dotfiles repository to a new machine, but this broke my .bashrc alias. For some reason even tho the repo was cloned into $HOME/dotfiles the alias no longer recognizes it as a git repo when using the alias. Inside the $HOME/dotfiles dir it is recognized by a simple git status command, but the alias doesn't work.

How do you diff and merge using this technique? I can't figure out a way to use vim-fugitive or any other vim/nvim diff tools because of the alias.

⚠️ BE CAREFULL EVERYBODY WHO'S GONNA USE THAT METHOD... ⚠️ I did 'config reset --hard' to my repo and that ALMOST killed all my configs. If you have done like that you still can get back to the last commit: check 'config reflog' and then 'git reset --hard ' back to the last commit.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but when I do config add . to add everything in my .config folder its trying to add all of my home folder with i.e -warning: adding embedded git repository: .cache/yay/f3 Is there a way to add everything in the dotfiles at once? as there may be more changes from updates etc?

what about if I use the native vim package manager and manage those with submodules? - in ~/.vim/pack. can i make this part of my bare repo?

What do you do with the README.md file? Do you have to keep the README.md file in your home?

Death to dotfiles! Not only do they clutter your home directory, they are also visible to other users, who can see what sort of apps you use, which is a privacy breach. Luckily, more and more apps are adopting the XDG Base Directory spec , which defines default directories ~/.config/, ~/.local/ and the rest of it to contain these things (and these locations can be overridden by environment variables if you wish). If you are a developer working on an app which needs to create user preference/cache files and the like, and you haven’t already adopted this spec, I urge you to do so!

I tried to get this working, but I couldn't. I'll have to use the simlink method until I find out why. Although I don't know yet how I'm going to find out without trying again. It kind of feels like that song titled There's a Hole in The Bucket.

Good video.

Hi! I like this method, but come into some problems when i try to get my configs on a new machine. Things just look weird. Can somebody please give me a proper way to do it with such method?

Well i used git bare for some time for managing my code. But i dropped it for GITEA. Ive setup it manually and its already easy but ive seen theres docker image and now it even easier.

Is the video flipped or do you have your headphones on backwards?

damn, that is a sexy desktop. which wm is this?

Checkout the staw command. You will like it a lot

how does one clone this repo onto a new machine? If I do a normal `git clone` it just has all of the files in a single directory

ty brah

How do I move my dotfiles to anothe machine and restore files ?