Living with a temporary home

The main problem with using virtual machines at school or work is that the home directory is sometimes made vollatile by the system administrators. Every time that you log in, all dotfiles are gone. As a solution, you can use the permanent network share or a cvs repository to store dotfiles, and stow to manage them and restore them in a timely manner, only needing to run one script.

Stow

GNU stow can be downloaded from its homepage, or from any of the mirrors.

Install stow as a user

The best option is to download stow-latest.tar.gz. Then, to install it follow these steps:

tar xf stow-latest.tar.gz
cd stow-*
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local
make
make install

Install stow to non-volatile storage

Now that stow is installed, we can move on to move it to the user's permanent storage (identified here as $STORAGE):

mkdir -p $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/{bin,share/{doc,info,man/man8,perl5}}

mv $HOME/.local/bin/{stow,chkstow} $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/bin
mv $HOME/.local/share/doc/stow $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/share/doc
mv $HOME/.local/share/info/{dir,stow.info} $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/share/info
mv $HOME/.local/share/man/man8/stow.8 $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/share/man/man8
mv $HOME/.local/share/perl5/{Stow,Stow.pm} $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/share/perl5

ln -s $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/bin/stow $HOME/.local/bin
ln -s $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/bin/chkstow $HOME/.local/bin
ln -s $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/share/perl5/Stow $HOME/.local/share/perl5
ln -s $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/share/perl5/Stow.pm $HOME/.local/share/perl5

Now stow is safely stowed away in permanent storage. All is left to do is write a small script to restore stow, such as:

#!/bin/bash

mkdir -p $HOME/.local/{bin,share/{doc,info,man/man8,perl5}}

ln -s $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/bin/stow $HOME/.local/bin
ln -s $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/bin/chkstow $HOME/.local/bin
ln -s $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/share/perl5/Stow $HOME/.local/share/perl5
ln -s $STORAGE/stowed/stow/.local/share/perl5/Stow.pm $HOME/.local/share/perl5

Using stow

Usage of stow is detailed in this article, but the bsics are: create in a folder the tree that must be replicated, such as we have done for stow itself. An example for the bash dotfiles would look like:

bash
├── .bash_profile
└── .bashrc

It would be applied with stow --target $HOME bash (for the folder name, not the binary name). Some of these folders could also be imported into the cvs of your choice for easier storage and sync.

Now it is trivially easy to restore your dotfiles:

stow="stow --target $HOME"

cd $STORAGE/stowed

$stow bash
$stow vim
$stow gitconfig

There are examples of both scripts in the repo, one for the first time install and movement of stow to permanent storage and another to use once per session.