Make managing dotfiles a breeze with Stow
For the longest time, I managed my dotfiles with copy and paste. It was really inconvenient to recreate my dotfiles over and over again. That was until I discovered GNU Stow. With Stow, I keep my dotfiles in a remote Git repository, and it has changed the way I manage my dotfiles forever. In this article I will explain how to configure GNU Stow.
Set up
First we need to create a new directory to stow your dotfiles. This should be in your home directory and I'm going to name my directory dotfiles.
mkdir $HOME/dotfiles
cd dotfiles
The fist thing I want to stow is my ~/.zshrc file in the base of my home directory. We’ll need to copy the file to the dotfiles directory.
cp ~/.zshrc .
When stowing things in the dotfiles directory it’s important to keep the layout the same as in your home directory. Because the zshrc file is in the top level my home directory it needs to live in the top level of the dotfiles directory as well.
Before get started with GNU Stow let’s make a copy of the ~/.zshrc file that is in our home folder. That way if we make a mistake we can revert it later.
cd $HOME
cp ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.copy
GNU Stow
GNU Stow docs it descibes itself as a symlink farm manager. When you "stow" a file, it will create an symlink for all of the files and folders in inside the directory you pass to it. That means GNU Stow can help you to store all of your configuration files in one place.
Below is an example of a child directory that I want to stow. Inside of the child directory there are two files named a and b, and a third file named c which is stowed in a nested directory. I'll add the tree command to help you visualize the child directory.
cd parent/child && tree
.
├── a
├── b
└── nested
└── c
2 directories, 3 files
Now that you know what our example looks like we are going to stow it by passing the the child directory to it. This will tell stow to create a symlink farm inside of the parent directory.
stow ~/parent/child
If you are already in the child directory just run.
stow .
Now if we go to the parent directory and run the tree command you will see that GNU stow created symlinks for each of our files and directories.
cd parent && tree
.
├── a -> child/a
├── b -> child/b
├── child
│ ├── a
│ ├── b
│ └── nested
│ └── c
└── nested -> child/nested
4 directories, 5 files
Symlinking will create identical files and directories that are represented with the -> syntax when running the tree command. Go ahead and give it a try. You will notice how if you make changes to any of the files in the child directory they will automatically be updated in the parent directory. Keep in mind that stow won't track new files or directories so you will need to rerun it if you make those kinds of changes.
Now that we've played around with an example let's stow our .zshrc file.
The rest is coming soon...