#stow #dotfiles #bash

My dotfile management and versioning was mediocre at best. I had a dotfiles git repository where each branch represents a different machine. However, making sure that I captured all my changes in git was challenging since there wasn’t a link to from the dot file to my dotfile repo. GNU Stow to the rescue!

What is GNU Stow?

GNU Stow manages sym links. That’s all it does. It consolidates all the original files in a singe location, but separated by packages. Each package, or directory, contains the same directory structure as the location the original file is located.

e.g. 

The following file: xmonad/.xmonad/lib/Xmonad/Util/Brightness.hs will be stowed in the target directory at .xmonad/lib/Xmonad/Util/Brightness.hs.

Typically the target directory is the parent of the package directory, but his can be changed via the -t option.

You can “stow” the config to the target directory by executing stow xmonad, and delete it by stow -D xmonad. However, I like being explicit in my commands. There are some default options that I explicitly use.

e.g. stow xmonad would be the same as stow -St ~ xmonad.

Migrating to Stow

I had my dotfiles directory in my home directory that is versioned using git.

~/dotfiles

I originally had a flat directory structure where all dotfiles resided in this main directory. To start using stow, I had to create sub directories for each stow package. The result is the following:

~/dotfiles$ tree -d 
.
├── bash
├── git
├── local
├── sbt
├── vim
└── xmonad

Migrating to this setup was pretty easy. I created the package directory, mimicking the directory structure of the target file(s) I want to stow, along with empty files with the same name as the target.

e.g.

cd ~/dotfiles
mkdir -p xmonad/.xmonad/lib/Xmonad/Util/
touch Brightness.hs

Then, I used the --adopt flag to move the files from my home directory to the package directory, then create the symbolic link using stow. Before doing any real modifications, I always used the --no flag to just do a trial run of executing the command along with the -v flag for a more verbose output.

e.g.

To test the command: stow --adopt --no -vSt ~ xmonad

To finally execute the command. stow --adopt -vSt ~ xmonad

I repeated the process for all my dotfiles using different packages them into different packages.

Here’s the final result for the xmonad package.

~/dotfiles$ find xmonad -type f
xmonad/.xmonad/lib/XMonad/Util/Brightness.hs
xmonad/.xmonad/xmobar.hs
xmonad/.xmonad/xmonad-session-rc
xmonad/.xmonad/xmonad.hs
~/dotfiles$ cd
~$ find .xmonad -type l -ls
 26345986      4 lrwxrwxrwx   1 freddie  freddie        65 Sep  6 14:06 .xmonad/lib/XMonad/Util/Brightness.hs -> ../../../../dotfiles/xmonad/.xmonad/lib/XMonad/Util/Brightness.hs
 24117849      0 lrwxrwxrwx   1 freddie  freddie        36 Sep  6 14:06 .xmonad/xmobar.hs -> ../dotfiles/xmonad/.xmonad/xmobar.hs
 24117857      0 lrwxrwxrwx   1 freddie  freddie        44 Sep  6 14:06 .xmonad/xmonad-session-rc -> ../dotfiles/xmonad/.xmonad/xmonad-session-rc
 24117860      0 lrwxrwxrwx   1 freddie  freddie        36 Sep  6 14:06 .xmonad/xmonad.hs -> ../dotfiles/xmonad/.xmonad/xmonad.hs

2020-Oct-04