Managing dotfiles with git [updated]

After a few more months of tweaking my git-based workflow for managing dotfiles across multiple machines with git, I have finally packaged up my git/dotfiles solution and open-sourced it via GitHub.

Over the last few months I've migrated all of my accounts across 6 boxes (2 mac & 4 linux) to this solution. It has worked remarkably well.

Setup

Once I have an account on a new box, all I have to do is:

cd ~

git clone git://github.com/apinstein/dotfiles.git dotfiles

cd dotfiles

rake

That's it!

All of my setups for ssh-agent, screen, zsh, postgres, vim, git, svn, etc are available immediately on the new box.

When you improve your "stock" dotfiles on any machine, you can then commit and push or pull the changes to your other boxes.

Any configuration needed local to that box can be done in the .local version of the dotfile, for instance there's a ~/.zshrc.local for stuff that only makes sense on this box.

Besides having useful configs for a bunch of programs, these scripts also include:

• Automated ssh-agent setup, key addition, and automatic "connection" of any new shells on that box (for that user of course) to your ssh-agent. Also includes my solution for automatically re-connecting ssh-agent to shells in screen after re-attching to screen.
• Automatically spawn a screen session on first login only; remind new shells how to re-attach to screen.

I hope that you find this solution useful and look forward to your feedback.

Enjoy,

Alan