How to manage your dotfiles with homesick

Since quite a while, I try to find a good solution for sharing my dotfiles between my different computers.

I started with chef — Unfortunately, this did not work so well. Especially if you also want to use your dotfiles on a server. Also, it felt a little complicated.

The next approach I took was putting my dotfiles into my Dropbox and symlink them. This worked ok. But Dropbox on a server? No way.

So, I kept looking. A few days ago, I stumbled over homesick — an astonishing ruby gem that manages your dotfiles.

How to set it up

First install homesick:

gem install homesick

Now create a “castle”. A castle is a collection of dotfiles.

homesick generate ~/dotfiles

This creates a git repro with a /home folder inside. Just put your dotfiles / dotfolders in there. Then push the stuff to GitHub.

Now install the castle with homesick.

homesick clone https://github.com/foo/dotfiles.git

Now let homesick do its magic.

homesick symlink dotfiles

All the dotfiles from within this castle will be symlinked.

This is wonderful!

• You feel at home at each of your servers in no time
• You share your dotfiles with the world
• You can learn from others and refine your files
• You can put essential little scripts into a .bin directory.
• The castle concept allows you to try someone else’s dotfiles

A word of caution

Please do not put sensitive information into you dotfiles.Especially ssh keys, bash histories and passwords in configurationfiles do not belong on GitHub.

Try it!

Seriously. It’s magical. This is one of those things that you try out, and you ask yourself how you could possibly live without it.

Interested? Have a look at my dotfiles.