Taken from https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles

1. Go to home directory and ignore the folder where you will clone the file

cd
echo "dotfiles" >> .gitignore

2. Clone dotfiles into a bare repository in $HOME:

git clone --bare [email protected]:carlosluis/dotfiles.git $HOME/dotfiles

3. In case you don't have it in .bashrc, go to the file add this line to define the alias:

alias dotfiles='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'

4. Source your changes

source ~/.bashrc

5. Checkout the actual content from the bare repository into $HOME

dotfiles checkout

6. Set the flag showUntrackedFIles to no on this local repo

dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Let's say you modified the .bashrc file and want to commit the change

1. Go to $HOME and verify the status of the dotfiles repo

cd
dotfiles status

2. You can now verify all your unstaged changes and perform regulat git operations but using the dotfiles alias. Example: dotfiles diff will show you the diff of the tracked changes. To commit the changes:

dotfiles add .bashrc
dotfiles commit -m "minor change to .bashrc"

3. Push the changes upstream

dotfiles push

if you want to add a new file to the dotfiles (and start tracking its changes), you can simply do

dotfiles add <currently untracked file>

and commit/push.