Installation

Warning: If you want to give these dotfiles a try, you should first fork this repository, review the code, and remove things you don’t want or need. Don’t blindly use my settings unless you know what that entails. Use at your own risk!

Using Git and the bootstrap script

You can clone the repository wherever you want. (I like to keep it in ~/src/dotfiles, with ~/dotfiles as a symlink.) The bootstrapper script will pull in the latest version and copy the files to your home folder.

ln -s ~/src/dotfiles ~/dotfiles

git clone https://github.com/jamesfdavis/dotfiles.git && cd dotfiles && source bootstrap.sh

To update, cd into your local dotfiles repository and then:

source bootstrap.sh

Alternatively, to update while avoiding the confirmation prompt:

set -- -f; source bootstrap.sh

To update later on, just run that command again.

Add custom commands without creating a new fork

If ~/.extra exists, it will be sourced along with the other files. You can use this to add a few custom commands without the need to fork this entire repository, or to add commands you don’t want to commit to a public repository.

My ~/.extra looks something like this:

# Git credentials
# Not in the repository, to prevent people from accidentally committing under my name
GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="James Davis"
GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="ragingsmurf@gmail.com"
GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"
git config --global user.name "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"
git config --global user.email "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"

# GPG Key
export KEYID=0x_master_key_id

# GitHub
export SIGNING_KEY="pgp_signing_key_id"
export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="James Davis"
export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="ragingsmurf@gmail.com"

export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"
export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"

git config --global user.name "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"
git config --global user.email "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"
git config --global user.signingkey "$SIGNING_KEY"!

Add WORK_HOST=true to flag loading resources from alt locations.

You could also use ~/.extra to override settings, functions and aliases from my dotfiles repository. It’s probably better to fork this repository instead, though.

Sensible macOS defaults

When setting up a new Mac, you may want to set some sensible macOS defaults:

./.macos

Install Homebrew formulae

When setting up a new Mac, you may want to install some common Homebrew formulae (after installing Homebrew, of course):

./brew.sh

Some of the functionality of these dotfiles depends on formulae installed by brew.sh. If you don’t plan to run brew.sh, you should look carefully through the script and manually install any particularly important ones. A good example is Bash/Git completion: the dotfiles use a special version from Homebrew.