I like to use the same or similar collections of .bashrc, .profile, .vimrc and other 'rc' files on my home, work and cloud compute machines. Manually copying and pasting the snippets that I want between hosts is slow and cumbersome, so I needed a solution.

I decided to keep all my 'rc files' or 'dot files' in a single Git repository which I could then sync a local copy to each machine. I can then create symlinks from my home directory to the files that I want to use inside that checkout.

My dotfiles project on GitHub is a public version of the scripts I wrote that allow me to selectively symlink files from that repository of 'dot files', depending on the hostname or operating system.

See https://github.com/neechbear/dotfiles/blob/master/README.md for more information.

Bash version 4 or higher is required as the scripts use associative arrays and other features not available in Bash 3.

Installation is as simple as:

git clone https://github.com/neechbear/dotfiles.git
dotfiles/bin/dotfiles.sh install
dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-symlink-files dotfiles/ ~

It may look something like this:

nicolaw@laptop:~$ git clone https://github.com/neechbear/dotfiles.git
Cloning into 'dotfiles'...
remote: Counting objects: 3, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
nicolaw@laptop:~$ cd dotfiles/
nicolaw@laptop:~/dotfiles$ bin/dotfiles.sh install
‘bin/dotfiles-available-identities’ -> ‘dotfiles.sh’
‘bin/dotfiles-file-weights’ -> ‘dotfiles.sh’
‘bin/dotfiles-symlink-files’ -> ‘dotfiles.sh’
‘bin/dotfiles-normalised-files’ -> ‘dotfiles.sh’
‘bin/dotfiles-best-file’ -> ‘dotfiles.sh’
nicolaw@laptop:~/dotfiles$ bin/dotfiles-symlink-files ~/dotfiles/ ~
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-symlink-files’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-symlink-files’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-available-identities’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-available-identities’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-normalised-files’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-normalised-files’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-file-weights’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-file-weights’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-best-file’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-best-file’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles.sh’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles.sh’
nicolaw@laptop:~/dotfiles$

You can then put files inside your dotfiles directory that will either get symlinked in to place on all your machines, or name them with a special ~IDENTITY suffix, this limiting which machines that particular file will be symlinked on.

Available identiies can be found with the dotfiles-available-identities command.

nicolaw@laptop:~/dotfiles$ bin/dotfiles-available-identities
@laptop
@laptop.home.nicolaw.co.uk
%debian
%linux
%linux-4.4.0-45-generic
@home.nicolaw.co.uk
%xenial
%ubuntu
%ubuntu-16.04
%ubuntu-xenial

Multiple identities can be applied to a file by delimiting them with comma , characters.

Composite identities requiring more than one identity to be matched can be applied by concatinating them with the plus + character.

Examples:

• dotfiles/.bashrc~%linux
• dotfiles/.bachrc~%darwin,%freebsd
• dotfiles/.bash_logout~@myhostname.domain.com+%ubuntu-trusty

Where more than one file matches a host, a weighting order is applied to the file identities, and the highest weighted file is used. See dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-file-weights for an example.

Here we create a couple of different .examplerc files. The first is intended to be used on Ubuntu and Debian based hosts; the second on RedHat and Fedora.

nicolaw@laptop:~$ echo "# Debian family example config file" > 'dotfiles/.examplerc~%ubuntu,%debian'
nicolaw@laptop:~$ echo "# RedHat family example config file" > 'dotfiles/.examplerc~%redhat,%fedora'

Next we re-run the dotfiles-symlink-files command, giving ~/dotfiles/ as the source directory containing your configuration files that you want to be symlinked to, and the second argument ~ indicating the files should be linked in to your home directory.

nicolaw@laptop:~$ dotfiles-symlink-files ~/dotfiles/ ~
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-normalised-files’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-normalised-files’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-available-identities’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-available-identities’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-best-file’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-best-file’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-file-weights’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-file-weights’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles.sh’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles.sh’
‘/home/nicolaw/bin/dotfiles-symlink-files’ -> ‘../dotfiles/bin/dotfiles-symlink-files’
‘/home/nicolaw/.examplerc’ -> ‘dotfiles/.examplerc~%ubuntu,%debian’
nicolaw@laptop:~$ ll .examplerc
lrwxrwxrwx 1 nicolaw nicolaw 35 Nov  1 23:09 .examplerc -> dotfiles/.examplerc~%ubuntu,%debian
nicolaw@laptop:~$ cat .examplerc
# Debian family example config file
nicolaw@laptop:~$