Introduction

Dotfiles, we all love them. If you’re anything like me and use the command line a lot you surely use dotfiles. Things like your vimrc, zshrc, tmux config, etc are all dotfiles.

So why should you make a repo with your dotfiles?

A github repo including all your dotfiles makes it easier to deploy them later, also makes it possible for other people to use them. I get asked occasionally, “how did you make your setup look like that?” and now I can just direct them to my dotfiles on github.

Setting up this github repo

Quite easy actually, I wrote a deployment script, you should too for easy deployment, and you can use my repo as a template, just please credit me. :) dotfiles repo

Things to know when scripting your dotfiles install

• ALWAYS declare your shell at top in this way to make it *nix agnostic

#!/usr/bin/env bash

• DO NOT make one big script, split it up into multiple scripts for easy editing and partial deployment.
• Always Comment your scripts…this shouldn’t have to be said but it’s being said.
• If you use distro/os specific commands, be sure to add detection so those commands don’t run on an unsupported OS.
• The more complex the script is the more room for mistakes, this is one reason why I recommend breaking it up into multiple little scripts.