How to backup/sync all of your dotfiles with Github

As a developer, one of the challenges that we are facing every day is to backup or sync up all of our dot(.) files with a new or another environment. There are many dotfiles in my machine such as .alias, .vimrc, .zshrc, .gitconfig etc...

I'm not going to explain how to get a back up of all your files because each one of us has a different environment, so I'll explain how to backup your VS-Code setting. I know there is a VS-Code extension that syncs up your setting with Github. Our goal is to understand how to back up #vscode settings, snippets, extensions, and sync it with Github manually.

Create a Script

• Create a new Github repository in your Github.com
• In your local machine go to the desktop and open an empty folder in your terminal

• Initiate an empty Git repository with $ git init and connect the local repo to newly created repo with $ git remote add git@github.com:yourusername/yourrepo.git

• Create a shell script and name it whatever you want, like backup.sh and past the following code on that file.
  

#!/bin/bash # check to see is git command line installed in this machine IS_GIT_AVAILABLE="$(git --version)" if [[ $IS_GIT_AVAILABLE == *"version"* ]]; then echo "Git is Available" else echo "Git is not installed" exit 1 fi # copy Vs-Code files cp $HOME/Library/Application\  Support/Code/User/{keybindings.json,settings.json,spellright.dict} . # copy snippets folder cp -r $HOME/Library/Application\ Support/Code/User/snippets . # copy list of extensions that currently installed code --list-extensions --show-versions >> ../../vscode/extensions.txt # copy other dot files  cp $HOME/{.zshrc,.vimrc} . # Check git status gs="$(git status | grep -i "modified")" # echo "${gs}" # If there is a new change if [[ $gs == *"modified"* ]]; then echo "push" fi # push to Github git add -u; git commit -m "New backup `date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`"; git push origin master 

• Change the script permission with $ chmod +x backup.sh.
• Run the script with $ ./backup.sh

If you want to run in background services:

• crontab -e and add your script path and time you want to run the script for example

$ crontab -e # this is open the cronjobs table in vim mode use i for insert mode # this is run the script every minutes $ 1 * * * * cd /Users/macp15/Projects/dotfiles/scripts/backup && ./backup.sh # display list of cron jobs $ crontab -l 

Done (Khalas).