Since a few months I keep configuration parts of my home directory managed with git. This allows me to easily check out my home directory on my servers and have access to the same environment.

Today I wrote a script to make that slightly easier. I wrote the following script which is stored as ~/bin/init-host.

 #!/bin/bash
 #
 # Copies my git repository to the given host.
 cd ~/
 echo "You'll be asked for your password on each host."

 for host in $*; do
     tar -czf - .git | ssh $host "git --version && \
         tar -xvzf - --exclude '._*' && \
         git reset --hard HEAD"
 done

It logs into all hosts given as command line parameters. On each it deploys the home directory using the ~/.git repository. A few specialties:

  • tar on OS X creates ugly resource fork files (._original_filename). Those are not copied over.
  • The file is only extracted if git is installed on the target server. That’s the purpose of the git --version line.

The motivation for this is that unlike subversion git does not allow me to check out a repository into an existing directory. At least not with git clone - lower-level commands may be able to do this. So I always ended up doing a git clone into a temporary directory, followed by moving around some files to get the setup working.

This script now allows me to get around this problem.