Stowing dotfiles

I recently found about a piece of GNU software called Stow¹.

It lets you manage your dotfiles in a really simple way, meaning you can put them in git and have them easily transferable between machines.

What it will do is let you move all your dotfiles into a directory, and then symlink them back into your home directory with a simple command.

From the man page²:

Stow is a symlink farm manager which takes distinct sets of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes them all appear to be installed in a single directory tree.

Set up

First you’ll need to install Stow using your package manager of choice. I use a Mac, so it’s just:

brew install stow

Then you’ll need to create a directory in which to store your dotfiles, and directories within it to keep them separate.

mkdir ~/dotfiles;
mkdir ~/dotfiles/git;
mkdir ~/dotfiles/zsh;

Move your dotfiles into the relevant directories:

mv ~/.gitconfig ~/dotfiles/git;
mv ~/.zshrc ~/dotfiles/zsh;
mv ~/.zshenv ~/dotfiles/zsh;

The magic part

Now here’s where stow comes in. Stow will, given a source directory and a destination directory, create symlinks in the destination directory to all the files in the source directory.

From within ~/dotfiles

stow -R -t ~ git

Here’s an explanation of what that command is doing:

-R

This will overwrite your symlinks, say if you’ve updated your dotfiles on another machine and want to sync them to your current machine From the manpage:

Restow packages (first unstow, then stow again). This is useful for pruning obsolete symlinks from the target tree after updating the software in a package.

-t ~

The target directory. This is where the symlinks will be created.

git

The final argument is the directory containing the files to be symlinked to, in this case, git.

Putting it all together, running stow -R -t ~ git will create a symlink in your home directory to ~/dotfiles/git/.gitconfig.

And it’s that simple.

Now you can git init inside your ~/dotfiles directory, push them up to your remote and have them immediately available on all your machines.

Here’s a simple bit of bash that will stow all the dotfiles in your home directory from your ~/dotfiles repo:

for d in */ ; do
    stow -R -t ~ "$d"
done

For reference, here are my dotfiles on GitHub.