To publish my configs, or not, that is the question.

This is a HOWTO on publishing certain Unix config files while keeping others private using GNU stow and ?clever? groupings of files into directories such as home.public.dotfies and home.private.mailconfig

I like to publish my personal config files (.bashrc, emacs configs, etc) but there are some things you probably just don’t want to share because they only apply to you (your list of rss feeds) or are just personal, and some things you should not share such as files with passwords.

To solve this problem, I break stuff down into public,private and secret categories. I used to have these live under

~/{public,private,secret}/*

but any more, I just used GNU stow which builds symlink trees. Now I have

~/stow/home.public/dotfiles/.bashrc

which gets symliked into

~/.bashrc

by doing

cd ~/stow/home.public/dotfiles
stow

The beauty of this is that I have repos made public such as

http://git.galthub.com:3000/gmj/home.public.dotfiles

and others private and secret not published. You can even mix “work” and “home” by using hierarchies such as

work.private.dotfiles

to use different ~/.gitconfig files.

You get the idea. I’ve probably gone to far with it http://git.galthub.com:3000/gmj/

#35 of #100DaysToOffload take 2.1, https://100daystooffload.com/