After I got new work laptop, I needed to transfer some configuration files to it from the old one. This introduced an opportunity to start versioning it, and also providing more flexible backup handle, finally. It surely is not a good idea to set version control above whole $HOME. When looking for solution to this problemi, I stumbled upon GNU Stow.

Let’s say your $HOME looks like this:

.bashrc
.bash_profile
.git
.vim
.vimrc
Desktop
Documents
Downloads
...

You surely know that .bashrc and .bash_profile represent Bash configuration. But how to pass this information to back up solution/versioning system when you want to separate configurations for different software?

GNU Stow

GNU Stow is basically simple symlink management software. Let’s setup directory containing all configuration we want to keep under git as a child of $HOME – configuration. Under this directory we can create dicrectories containing per-software configuration:

configuration/
├── bash
├── git
└── vim

First, let’s move configuration to corresponding directory: mv .bash* configuration/bash/.

What stow command does by default is that it takes the contents of folder which is passed as an argument and creates symlinks to this content in parent directory. When stow bash is called in configuration directory, it takes the files in bash directory and in $HOME (which is a parent of configuration) creates symlinks to this files.

$HOME then looks like this:

...
.bash_profile -> configuration/bash/.bash_profile
.bashrc -> configuration/bash/.bashrc
...

Version it!

The last thing is using git or your preffered VCS to version this configuration. Just run git init, git add . and git commit -m "Initial commit" in configuration directory and you are all set.

Resources