Where I store all of my configurations, in one handy and easy-to-update repository!

As time has gone on, and I've grown to use more machines, both physical and virtual, in my day-to-day life, it's become tedious trying to keep track of all of the changes I make to each configuration file, and making sure to port them all over to the various machines. I tried keeping a gist of all of these available, but that wasn't a much better solution, as I most frequently just used that as a central source for copying and pasting.

Realizing that there was probably a better way, I set about making a single repository with a built-in update system. The result, you see, is before you. Bask in its glory.

The main points of interaction are the installer script and the rcfiles script. Sometimes, after an update, you might want to run reshell, if you're absolutely desperate to get the changes in your active shell session right now. There are also other scripts supplied in the setup/ directory, but these are used mostly for under-the-hood work.

Any site-local configuration should reside in the site/ directory. This directory is deliberately ignored by the .gitignore for this purpose. There are currently two particular files that are loaded on shell login from that directory, if they are present: aliases.sh and functions.sh. One should ideally contain any local aliases useful for that machine, and the other any useful shell functions, though there is no restriction or checking done on either; it is merely convention.

Wait, no! This is a terrible idea, you may just not realize it yet! I'm actually not very cool, OR hip. Also, you probably don't want your system configured like mine, and this is but one of many repositories of a similar nature. Your best bet is to browse around for "dotfiles" repositories around the net, and if you like, to read over mine (I've tried to make sure they're well-commented), to get a feel for any new and cool things you'd like to do for your own setup.

If, however, you're really adamant about being as cool as me (ha, ha, ha), or, more likely, you're actually me and you've forgotten how to run your own installer (for shame), continue on...

The installer script is located at setup/install.pl. You can either download the file and execute it, or run it directly from GitHub:

\curl -sSL https://raw.github.com/sycobuny/rcfiles/master/setup/install.pl \
    | perl

The slash is sorta-necessary, or at the very least intentional, in case you've aliased curl to a different command, this will bypass it. Oh, you'll need curl to be available, as well as perl, and a few other binaries. The installer will check for them for you, and warn you if you're missing any.

The installer will put the repository in ~/.rc by default, and clone from github.com/sycobuny/rcfiles. These settings can be overridden by supplying the following environment variables:

• $RCDIR - Where to install the repository locally
• $RC_GIT_REPOSITORY - The remote repository location

You can also manually clone the repository locally into your preferred location, and then run the installer script from there; it will assume that the location you're running from is the one you'd like to keep using.

A couple notes about changing the defaults:

• If you change the default installation directory through any mechanism, then the installer will create a file called ~/.rcdir which will have the installation directory. This is used by the shell rc files to determine where to load additional files from during their initial bootstrapping process.
• If you clone the repository and run the installer, but try to provide a different git remote location via RC_GIT_REPOSITORY, then the installer will fail, as it won't overwrite the remote location of an existing repository.

At some point I'll probably build in a periodic checking mechanism, looking for new updates and (potentially) automatically merging them in. I'd also like to make site-specific configuration easier by perhaps using a git-style configuration file; this could make it possible to change the location of things like perlbrew as well, and control many other things.

More pressing, however, is building in a mechanism to automatically install the various dependent systems as well, in one go (such as vundle for Vim and oh-my-zsh for the shell...maybe even checking if zsh is the current shell before the latter or if Vim is available before the former).

Anything that I wrote in this repository is licensed under the MIT license (see LICENSE.md).

Notably, I did a significant rewrite of the tmx() shell function in configs/shell/functions-tmx.sh, but it was originally posted on the Gentoo Forums. If it were to default to any sort of license, I'd guess GPL (though I personally would never willingly choose this license #ConfessYourUnpopularOpinion). Content note: I Am Not A Lawyer and the specifics of this kind of use case elude me. Feel free to enlighten me, if you /(d|c)are/.

Pretty much the entirety of the code in setup/git-diff-full.sh (minus a couple stylistic tweaks) was a posted answer on Stack Overflow, and therefore did not have a license directly attached either. Again, I'm not a lawyer but I believe this means it's, by default, under Creative Commons Share-Alike per the Stack Exchange TOS.

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