Using stow to Backup Dotfiles - Things I'm Learning

Mar 3, 2024

Backing up dotfiles with stow

How to start using GNU Stow to make backups of your configuration files (dotfiles) and use git to version them and backup on a remote repo.

Setting up stow

Follow your package manager’s instructions for installing stow if you don’t have it installed already.

Create a folder in your home directory. I’m naming mine .dotfiles and all examples here will use that naming. You can pick whatever you want. Change to that directory to continue the steps.
```
mkdir ~/.dotfiles
cd ~/.dotfiles
```
Make folders in the .dotfiles directory for each app/tool you want to backup. For example: zsh, nvim, git…
```
mkdir git
mkdir zsh
```
Move the config file from your home directory to the application folder you created. Example for git:
```
mv ~/.gitconfig git
```
Run the stow command to re-link the gitconfig file back to your home directory
```
stow git
```

Verify the link:

> ls -l ~/.gitconfig
lrwxr-xr-x  1 james  staff  24 Mar  3 17:00 /Users/james/.gitconfig -> .dotfiles/git/.gitconfig

Repeat the above 3 steps for all the items you want to stow

Setting up the git repo

Set up source control for your dotfiles to keep track of changes made and optionally make remote backups on git server.

I added this snippet to my .zshrc to print a message when I sign in that lets me know if there are pending changes to any of the files I’m tracking in the .dotfiles directory. (Tested with zsh)

if [[ `git -C ~/.dotfiles/ status --porcelain` ]]; then
  echo "There's changes in .dotfiles!"
fi

git stow