Using stow to manage dotfiles

The Problem

I've got my personal machine and work machine. They both share somewhat same dotfiles - configurations that allow me to programme seamlessly. I've put these configurations in a git repo in ad hoc manner. Now when I have to setup my dev environment in new machine, I would clone this config repo and manually move each config file to the directory it belongs to. So, there's always two copies of a config file in my machine (one in git repo and another in directory where it actually supposed to be). And when I need to update a config file, I need to update in two places for a machine. This is painful!

The Solution: Stow 🚀

Stow is a symlink farm manager program which takes distinct sets of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes them all appear to be installed in a single directory tree.

You need perl to install stow. You can install perl using perlbrew. You can install stow following guidelines from here or if you're on mac, you can use homebrew.

sudo apt stow # Ubuntu

brew install stow # Homebrew Mac

Understanding directory structure

By default, target destination of the stowed files is parent directory of stow directory (current directory by default). We can change target destination using following command

stow -t [target/path] [PACKAGE]
# stow -t ~ zsh

To make things simpler, let's place our dotfiles in $HOME directory. We will treat every directory inside dotfiles as $HOME directory. For example, .zshrc file resides in the path ~ i.e. home directory. So, you can directly put your .zshrc file in the directory let's say dotfiles/zsh. And with the command stow zsh, a symlink to the .zshrc file is created at ~ directory.

Similarly, If you want symlink to be created at ~/.config/nvim, you would create nvim/.config/nvim in dotfiles.

stow -D <packagename> # delete stowed package
stow -R <packagename> # restows package
stow -h # for more commands

Deleting stowed package doesn't delete the file but only removes the symlink.