I've been using Linux for a little while and along the way have accumulated a fair bit of configuration (even though I try to remove the bits I don't need anymore).
I often find that these configs help me out (e.g. my Vim config) so, after the first few times I lost bits of it, I spent some time ensuring that I could keep it, even if I changed computers, had a hard drive fail or went mad and wrote a bunch of terrible configuration.
What amazing tool could solve my configuration backup problem?
Well, of course, its Git.
I keep any config and useful bash scripts that I need in a git repo. This includes:
- Vim config
- Zsh config
- Git config
- i3 config
- a font I like
- a script for setting up my favourite keyboard config
- a list of Python and NPM packages I commonly use
- a list of programs that I commonly use
- a script that installs all the above
So, lets step through what I needed to do this.
First, (assuming you are a Linux, or possibly Mac/BSD user) I'll assume you are familiar with a terminal (e.g. bash).
cd ~/.config
We're now in one of the most common places to store user specific configuration. Lets setup a git repo. I recommend using Github or Bitbucket.
This should give you an identifier for your git repo, mine is git@github.com:Cypher1/Castle.git.
git init
git remote add origin git@github.com:user/repo.git
Now you can add any files that you already have in .config.
git add important_file_to_backup
git commit -m "Adding important file"
Nice enough, but we are missing our actual dotfiles (the ones stored in our home directory).
So, lets grab those, I'll use my zshrc file as an example but you should be able to substitute to make this work for any dotfile.
First we move the actual dot file into our repo and add it.
mv ~/.zshrc ~/.config/zshrc
cd ~/.config/
git add zshrc
git commit -m "Adding my zshrc"
Now we need a bit of a trick to make it look (to our programs) like the dotfiles are still where we left them.
Fortunately there's a great tool for this called 'soft (or symbolic) links'. They make use of the structure of modern file systems to make a 'linked' version of a file or directory.
The utility to make soft links is called ln or link (find out more with man ln).
ln -s ~/.config/zshrc ~/.zshrc
This creates a new soft link at ~/.zshrc and connects it to ~/.config/zshrc.
Now programs that open ~/.zshrc will actually be opening ~/.config/zshrc, so all your edits will be tracked in the git repo.
Always remember to upload your changes to your remote repo so that you have them backed up.
git push origin master
I recommend learning more about git so that you can manage your backups and your changes to them.
For me, it was worth creating an installer script that does all my soft linking, and software installation.
You can find it here.