I wrote deploydots because when I researched how best to manage my dotfiles under a git repository, I came up with lots of solutions which either weren't reusable or clean to me with a sensible layout.
The way I use deploydots is I have a git repository, under ~/dotfiles which holds all of my dot files. Then I run deploydots to create symlinks for all the files in ~.
ruby 1.9+
deploydots is available as a gem at https://rubygems.org/gems/deploydots
To install it using gem, issue the following command: gem install deploydots
Create a directory ~/dotfiles where everything in this directory will be put under git.
~/dotfiles/README.md wont be symlinked to ~ if it exists. I reserve this filename so that you could store notes to the user about your dotfiles and how to install them, (git clone to ~ and run deploydots)
Organize ~/dotfiles as described below.
All direct descendants of ~/dotfiles will be prepended with a '.' so that you don't have to type ls -a to view folders under this directory. This also allows you to store files under ~/.git/ easily.
Only the direct descendants of ~/dotfiles get prepended with a '.'. All other descendant files get symlinked with the name stored under ~/dotfiles.
Folders will get created instead of symlinked as to not pollute the ~/dotfiles folder by applications that write new files to those folders.
~/dotfiles/vimrc is a file, when running deploydots, since it is an immediate descendant, it gets symlinked to ~/.vimrc.
~/dotfiles/tagurit/urls is a file, since this isn't a direct descendant of ~/dotfiles, it get's symlinked to ~/.tagurit/urls
Similarly for folders.
~/dotfiles/weechat is a folder, and a direct descendant of ~/dotfiles which will get created as ~/.weechat
~/dotfiles/urlwatch/cache is a folder and will get created as ~/.urlwatch/cache
mkdir ~/dotfiles
cd dotfiles
git init
cp ~/.vimrc vimrc
cp -r ~/.xmonad xmonad
git add -A
git commit -m 'initial commit'
git clone git://github.com/gostrc/dotfiles.git
deploydots