Pablo Fernandez

Tag: /etc

Revisioning /etc with Git

December 30, 2009

Technical
First and foremost I’m a coder, a coder who strongly believes in revision control. Second I am also a sysadmin; but only by accident. I have some servers and someone has to take care of them. I’m not a good sysadmin because I don’t have any interest on it so I learn as little as possible and also because I don’t want to be good at it and get stuck doing that all the time. What I love is to code.

I’m always scare of touching a file in /etc. What if I break something? I decided to treat /etc the same way I treat my software (where I am generally not afraid of touching anything). I decided to use revision control. So far I’ve never had to roll back a change in /etc, but it gives me a big peace of mind knowing that I can.

In the days of CVS and Subversion I thought about it, but I’ve never done it. It was just too cumbersome. But DVCS changed that, it made it trivial. That’s why I believe DVCS is a breakthru. Essentially what you need to revision-control your /etc with Git is to go to /etc and turn it into a repository:
```
cd /etc
git init
```
Done. It’s now a repo. Then, submit everything in there.
```
git add .
git commit -am "Initial commit. Before today it's prehistory, after today it's fun!"
```
From now on every time you modify a file you can do
```
git add <filename>
git commit -m "Description of the change to <filename>"
```
where <filename> is one or many files. Or if you are lazy you can also do:
```
git commit -am "Description to all the changes."
```
which will commit all pending changes. To see your pending changes do:
```
git status
```
and
```
git diff
```
When there are new files, you add them all with
```
git add .
```
and if some files were remove, you have to run
```
git add -u .
```
to be sure that they are remove in the repo as well (otherwise they’ll stay as pending changes forever).

That’s essentially all the commands I use when using git and doing sysadmin. If you ever have to do a rollback, merge, branch, etc, you’ll need to learn git for real.

One last thing. I often forget to commit my changes in /etc, so I created this script:
```
#!/usr/bin/env sh

cd /etc
git status | grep -v "On branch master" | grep -v "nothing to commit"
true # Don't return 1, which is what git status does when there's nothing to do.
```
on /etc/cron.daily/git-status which reminds me, daily, of my pending changes.

Hope it helps!

Tag: /etc

Revisioning /etc with Git