stow

Everyone’s got dotfiles, and some of us like to keep ‘em on GitHub. For me, the hardest part with this is getting all of the files in place after I cloned the repo. I had written a hacked up shell script, but it wasn’t really holding up to lots of use. Whenever I added a new file to the repo, it was a giant pain to have to update the install script as well.

Enter stow

I’m not a huge GNU fan¹, but they did get something write with this one. stow is a little util that symlinks the files inside a directory to the parent directory (while retaining the tree structure). So, if we take a look at my dotfiles (simplified for sanity)…

/home/ninjacharlie/.dotfiles
├── bin
│   └── bin
│       ├── colortest
│       ├── dm
│       └── ...
├── git
│   └── gitignore_global
├── i3
├── mksh
│   └── .mkshrc
├── README.md
├── shell
│   └── .sh
│       ├── aliases.sh
│       └── funcs.sh
├── tmux
└── vim

… and I want to just symlink my shell configuration files, I can cd to ~/.dotfiles and run:

stow mksh
stow shell

And voilà, I now have my ~/.mkshrc file and ~/.sh/ dir set up and ready to sync.

This utility is useful in any situation where lots of symlinks are flying around. You could use it to symlink the files in ~/bin to /usr/local/bin, or (if you’re a little crazy), you could symlink and track all the files in /etc.

[1] Overengineering and bloated codebases, but there are worse organizations/projects out there (cough chough freedesktop cough cough)