RoBerto Ortega

Not too complicated but highly useful. The purpose of doing this is to save your system configurations and host them somewhere. I have my dotfiles on github to share with the public, store them in a safe place, and to easily transfer them to other environments like my ubuntu server.

Start by creating a directory anywhere you want, inside your projects or $HOME directory. Then, copy all your dotfiles (.bashrc, .bash_profile, .vimrc, .gitconfig…) inside your new dotfiles directory. I leave my .profile for private configurations.

SYMLINKING THE FILES

After adding all your desired dotfiles, it is time to link them to your $HOME directory. This will replace the files with a symlink to the files inside the directory.

To do this, add a bash script. Inside the dotfiles directory, create a symlink-dotfiles file and add

#!/bin/bash

DOTFILES=(.gitconfig .gitignore .zshrc .vimrc .aliases)

#Remove old dotfiles and replace them
for dotfile in $(echo ${DOTFILES[*]});
do
    sudo rm -rf ~/$(echo $dotfile)
    ln -s ~/dotfiles/$(echo $dotfile) ~/$(echo $dotfile)
done

The script loops through the your desired files, removes them from home, and adds the symlink.

Run it with with bash

bash symlink-dotfiles

THAT’S IT!

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