Creating a Dotfiles system

Setup your shell

export DOTFILES_DIR="$HOME/.dotfiles" # or elsewhere
alias dotfiles='git --git-dir="$DOTFILES_DIR" --work-tree="$HOME"'

or for fish:

set -x DOTFILES_DIR "$HOME/.dotfiles"

function dotfiles
    git --git-dir="$DOTFILES_DIR" --work-tree="$HOME" $argv
end

Create bare repository

Note the git instead of dotfiles

git init --bare "$DOTFILES_DIR"

and push it afterwards using dotfiles:

dotfiles push

git should assist you setting the remote.

Note on public and private dotfile repository

Only make your dotfiles public if you are 100% sure that you have pushed or will push only content that you are absolutely comfortable with being seen by anyone, known or unknown.

Configure to ignore unknown files

dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Restoring Dotfiles

Setup an alias (temporarily inside the shell, you should have them already in a file that is being restored)

export DOTFILES_DIR="$HOME/.dotfiles" # or elsewhere
alias dotfiles='git --git-dir="$DOTFILES_DIR" --work-tree="$HOME"'

Clone the bare repository

The cloning depends on whether your Dotfiles repository is public or private.

a) If your Dotfiles are public, you can simply call

git clone --bare "<git-repo-url>" "$DOTFILES_DIR"

b) If they are private, you can create a token that can read the repository.

On GitHub, go to Settings > Developer Settings > Personal Access Token > fine-grained tokens.
Create a new token that you limit to the shortest possible time and only allow access to this one repository. Lastly, allow read-only access to the Content of the repository.

git clone --bare <token@git-repo-url> "$DOTFILES_DIR"

e.g.

git clone --bare https://tokentokentoken@github.com/bjoernahrens/dotfiles.git "$DOTFILES_DIR"

Restore the files

dotfiles checkout

The checkout might fail because you or your system already created some of your dotfiles:

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
    .zshrc
    .gitconfig
Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.
Aborting

The easiest option is to simply delete the files.
If they are part of your existing dotfiles (and you have not added any life-changing features), that should be fine.

Alternative: Backup your existing files

mkdir -p .config-backup && \
config checkout 2>&1 | egrep "\s+\." | awk {'print $1'} | \
xargs -I{} mv {} .config-backup/{}

Rerun the checkout command:

dotfiles checkout

Configure to ignore unknown files

dotfiles --local status.showUntrackedFiles no