Turning /etc Into A Git Repo With etckeeper
It is often desirable to turn /etc into a file repository on our servers, whether it be for production or development purposes. There is a great tool named etckeeper that automates pushing changes to a repo for us. That is, once we have it set up and do an initial push. etckeeper supports several version control, but we only care about git.
Install using your package manager of choice, for Gentoo users make sure if you have ‘cron’ USE flag enabled.
If we are going to be pushing to a remote repo (recommended) we need to edit /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf and modify the REMOTE_PUSH line to look like:
PUSH_REMOTE=”origin”
Now we need to instruct etckeeper to create an initial (empty) repository using /etc:
# etckeeper init -d /etc
Initialized empty Git repository in /etc/.git/
(optional: skip this step if you do not have a remote repo and wish to keep everything local) Next we will want to tell git/etckeeper where our remote repo is, but first we need to make sure we are in /etc:
# cd /etc
# git remote add origin https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@GITREPOHOST/DIR/repo.git
If that is successful there will be no output.
Now we want to do an initial commit:
# etckeeper commit “Initial commit.”
[master (root-commit) d918775] Initial commit.<snipped>
Finally we need to push our changes:
# git push -u origin master
Branch master set up to track remote branch master from origin.
Everything up-to-date
We can check the status at any time in the normal way:
# git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with ‘origin/master’.
nothing to commit, working tree clean
Depending on your distribution there should be an automatic cron.daily job installed. On Gentoo, we can take it a step further and force changes to be committed during an emerge by editing (or creating) /etc/portage/bashrc:
case “${EBUILD_PHASE}” in
setup|prerm) etckeeper pre-install ;;
postinst|postrm) etckeeper post-install ;;
esac
That’s all there is for getting a basic setup going and you should start seeing commits when there are changes in /etc to the repo.
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