Keeping dot files synched across machines?

Question

Like most *nix people, I tend to play with my tools and get them configured just the way that I like them. This was all well and good until recently. As I do more and more work, I tend to log onto more and more machines, and have more and more stuff that's configured great on my home machine, but not necessarily on my work machine, or my web server, or any of my work servers...

How do you keep these config files updated? Do you just manually copy them over? Do you have them stored somewhere public?

Answer 1

I've had pretty good luck keeping my files under a revision control system. It's not for everyone, but most programmers should be able to appreciate the benefits. Read

Keeping Your Life in Subversion

for an excellent description, including how to handle non-dotfile configuration (like cron jobs via the svnfix script) on multiple machines.

Answer 2

I also use subversion to manage my dotfiles. When I login to a box my confs are automagically updated for me. I also use github to store my confs publicly. I use git-svn to keep the two in sync.

Getting up and running on a new server is just a matter of running a few commands. The create_links script just creates the symlinks from the .dotfiles folder items into my $HOME, and also touches some files that don't need to be checked in.

$ cd

# checkout the files
$ svn co https://path/to/my/dotfiles/trunk .dotfiles

# remove any files that might be in the way
$ .dotfiles/create_links.sh unlink

# create the symlinks and other random tasks needed for setup
$ .dotfiles/create_links.sh

Answer 3

It seems like everywhere I look these days I find a new thing that makes me say "Hey, that'd be a good thing to use DropBox for"

Answer 4

Rsync is about your best solution. Examples can be found here:

http://troy.jdmz.net/rsync/index.html