Using Source Control for Bash Profile Files

I followed this blog post to add my dotfiles from $HOME to git.

That tutorial creates an alias for a custom git command to use for that directory, called dgit in their case. I found it ever so slighly annoying that I couldn’t just do git status etc in my $HOME directory, and had to remember another alias for it.

So to fix it, I wrote a wrapper function around the git command to either run the special detached Head command when in $HOME, and regular git anywhere else.

alias dotfiles='git --git-dir ~/repos/dotenv/.git --work-tree=$HOME'

gitOverride() {

		# In home directory, call custom detached head git command
		if [ $PWD = $HOME ]; then
				echo "Running dotfiles git command.."
				command git --git-dir ~/repos/dotenv/.git --work-tree=$HOME "$@"
		else
				echo "running regular git command";
				command git "$@"
		fi
}

alias git=gitOverride;

And that’s it! Works great, and saves just a little bit of brain space.

Quick paraphrasing of the rest of the process for posterity:

• Create your git directory (where .git will be), somewhere other than $HOME. E.g. $HOME/repos/dotenv
• Add a .gitignore file that ignores everything
• Add the above alias to your .bash_aliases or wherever you keep them
• If you want to add files in $HOME to source control, add them with git add -f [filename]