[Discuss] etckeeper (tool to store /etc/ in version control)

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 9:56 PM, David Kramer <david at thekramers.net> wrote:
> https://opensource.com/article/17/3/etckeeper-version-control
>
> Sounds good, and I can't think of any downsides.  I think the value add of
> etckeeper over just adding /etc to git is that it ties into package
> management and every change in /etc/ caused by a package install gets
> committed to git as such.  I'm not sure if those silent commits are a good
> thing or not.
>
> Thoughts?

I've been using etckeeper on one-off/personal systems for years now.
I just checked
and one system has a git log that goes back to 2011.  I think I
started on Ubuntu 10.04.
At the time, I didn't see the need for a configuration management system for an
environment that was never going to scale very large.  I mentioned it
on this list in 2012
and 2014 in the context of other discussions.  I still think it is
particularly good for my use case,
but the article you link to also points out that many configuration
management systems only track
explicitly stated files.  Etckeeper tracks everything unless told not
to do so.  I can
see that as useful even when configuration management is being used.
Unfortunately :-),
I have been lucky and have never had to use etckeeper to save my bacon.

To be fair, etckeeper does have issues.  It doesn't provide loss protection as a
result of hardware failure.  CMS systems pretty much always have a
separate server which acts as a backup for your systems' configurations.
If you use git with etckeeper you can push changes to a remote repository.
Alternatively, you can always add the entirety of /etc to your backup process.
It's not like it is that much data.  /etc on the system that has had etckeeper
since 2011 is under 280Meg. The other problem with etckeeper is that
not all configuration lives in /etc and it really doesn't handle this
case at all.
I think there might be some patches floating around to let it handle
more than one
directory, but it hasn't been a big enough issue for me to figure them out.
Crontab files in /var are the particular class of configuration file that comes
to mind for me.  You might have others.  Still for minimal effort
etckeeper provides
me with a lot of peace of mine.

Bill Bogstad