etckeeper vs git push and branches

It  may sound weird to save /etc in some software like git, but let’s have a look why it does make sense: git is a revision control system that tracks changes and in case is able to revert them. Basically perfect for keeping track of our configuration files. You may not want to publish them on github as they might contain sensitive data, but if you are running your own git server like me, it might be a good idea to push those to a central place.

After running

etckeeper init

as root or using sudo, we are pretty much set up except for removing shadow and shadow-. As we have to remove them from the repository too, git rm -r –cached shadow* comes in handy after adding those to .gitignore. Now things are ready for the first commit:

git commit -a -m 'initial /etc commit'

In the future we’ll use

etckeeper commit

to commit our changes and we’re done with the basic setup of etckeeper and we are ready to do a branch for our configs as we may want to store all of the configs in one repository for easier comparing and adding another ‘remote’ and pushing to there. Make sure you’re adding the right host there!

git branch -m master $HOSTNAME
git remote add origin git@git.myserver.com:path/to/repo.git
git push --set-upstream origin $HOSTNAME

git diff origin/server1 origin/server2 -- file

#!/bin/sh
git push --set-upstream origin $HOSTNAME