See the profiles README.
In 2025, I switched from a custom installation script that creates symlinks to using a bare repo approach. Migration involves removing the symlinks from $HOME before proceeding with the base repo install method.
# change to dotfiles repo with working files
cd path/to/dotfiles
# remove symlinks in $HOME that are sourced from dotfiles repo
find "$HOME" -maxdepth 1 -type l -exec sh -c '
for f; do
tgt=$(readlink -f "$f" 2>/dev/null || readlink "$f")
case $tgt in
"$PWD"/*) echo "$f" ;; # symlink points inside $PWD
esac
done
' sh {} + | xargs rmBare repo setup
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/dotfiles
git clone --bare https://github.com/jesselang/dotfiles.git $HOME/.local/share/dotfiles/bare-repo
# first time install requires a checkout
git --git-dir=$HOME/.local/share/dotfiles/bare-repo --work-tree=$HOME checkout
# restore after dotfiles-uninstall on an existing checkout
git --git-dir=$HOME/.local/share/dotfiles/bare-repo --work-tree=$HOME restore .Starting a new shell should provide a dotfiles alias to ease working with the
repo and work tree:
# use sparse checkout to avoid checking out docs and unused files.
dotfiles sparse-checkout set --no-cone \
'/*' \
'!/*.md' \ # exclude root-level docs
\ # (optional - exclude other paths that are emulator specific)
'!/.local/share/dotfiles/emulators'
# disable parse checkout to update docs, etc.
dotfiles sparse-checkout disable
# update your config before commiting changes
dotfiles config user.email ...
dotfiles ls-files
dotfiles status
dotfiles diff
dotfiles commit
# uninstall dotfiles using alias (consider checking for uncommitted changes first)
dotfiles-uninstall
# without alias
dotfiles ls-files -z | xargs -0 rmI don't want to forget about untracked files altogether, so rather than
setting status.showUntrackedFiles to no, I've decided to start with a
.gitignore file at the root to ignore paths I don't want tracked. This is
likely to be a bit noisy to start, but it's a trade-off I'm willing to make.