Managing Dotfiles with GNU Stow and Git

Table of Contents

• 1. What is GNU Stow?

• 2. Installation

• 3. Stow Dotfiles

• 4. Update Dotfiles

• 5. Save to a Git Repository

1. What is GNU Stow?

GNU Stow is described as a "symlink farm manager" on its homepage, which is true, but feels a bit underwhelming. Rather, I'd describe it as a tool to systematically and logically link, organize, and version control any files on your system.

2. Installation

First things first: let's install Stow. I'm on macOS, so I run the following command:

To ensure it's installed correctly, check the version:

3. Stow Dotfiles

Next, let's create a directory to use as the central source for all these files. In my case, I store all git repositories in my ~/git/ directory, so I will create a dotfiles directory here:

Next, let's stow our first set of dotfiles. We'll use zsh as an example here. To do this, we will:

1. Create a directory for Zsh.

2. Move our current Zsh configuration files into our Stow directory.

3. Use Stow to symlink the files back into our home directory.

By default, Stow will symlink your files (e.g., zsh) to the parent directory of the directory in which you execute the command. Since we're in the ~/git/dotfiles directory, we need to modify our stow command to ensure Stow symlinks the files to our home directory:

At this point, you have a centralized directory (/git/dotfiles) where you can stow any file and use stow to symlink it back to another directory on your system.

Therefore, you only need to navigate to this directory to make changes across your system.

4. Update Dotfiles

When you make changes to your Stow directory, you can inform Stow and have the program update its symlinks with the following command:

To summarize:

5. Save to a Git Repository

Lastly, let's finish the puzzle by ensuring that this configuration is long-lasting and can transfer amongst systems.

To this end, we will use Git as our VCS. You can simply create the repository, add your files, and push to your remote.

If you want to automate this even more, write an alias or a hook into your stow command to automatically commit your changes whenever they occur.

At this point, I have organized and managed my dotfiles much more efficiently and no longer lose them whenever I wipe my machines.