Can I use this to track system level files?

[achembarpu]

Hi,

I want to be able to track system level files, like /etc/pacman.conf .
How does yadm manage permissions and ownership of such files?

Thanks!

[TheLocehiliosan]

Managing files outside of your home directory isn't really within the standard use-case for yadm.

yadm only manages files within the configured worktree ($HOME by default). Also, yadm will use the effective user for file ownership just like Git.

However, if you wanted to bend yadm into managing system files, I could see doing something like this:

# create an alias to run yadm for system files
alias sysyadm="sudo yadm -Y /etc/yadm"

# initialize the yadm repo using the worktree of "/"
sysyadm init -w /

# continue to use sysyadm for managing system files
sysyadm add /etc/pacman.conf

sysyadm commit -m 'Add pacman.conf'

Assuming you have sudo rights, the sysyadm alias will work as if root was using yadm, having the owner be "root", with the ability to manage any file under /. If you were only interested in managing files under /etc, you could use that as the worktree instead. In the example above, the yadm configuration would be stored in /etc/yadm/config and the repo in /etc/yadm/repo.git.

[achembarpu]

Thanks! That answers my query. 👍

[void-m4110c]

This should definitely go into the documentation. Who stores only his user dotfiles and not the system-wide ones?

[TheLocehiliosan]

This isn’t a use I would particularly endorse, as there are generally other configuration management tools for system level configurations; Ansible, Puppet, etc.

However, I have found myself using yadm to manage configs on my routers. 😬

I’ll reopen this issue, and add a version of it to the website so it is easier for others to find.

[void-m4110c]

I see your point. Still I think, more information can not harm ;-)
Thanks for your fast reply and your great project!

[TheLocehiliosan]

This has been added to the FAQ.

[eyadsibai]

when I tried to clone to a new machine with sysyadm ... it did not replace the files .

[eyadsibai]

it cloned the repo, but didn't put the files where they suppose to be.

[TheLocehiliosan]

@eyadsibai What clone command did you use? Did you specify the -w option to set the worktree (during the clone)?

[eyadsibai]

nope, just sysyadm clone repo_link

[TheLocehiliosan]

@eyadsibai - OK, Can you try using -w / with the clone command? I guess when I put this info into the FAQ, I mention that with the init command, but no mention of doing that for the clone command.

I'm going to re-open this issue, and have the FAQ updated.

[eyadsibai]

it works now thanks!

[shadowrylander]

Quick note: I had an issue where the user settings, i.e. the email and username, weren't being detected by the root version, even after setting them for just the repo and globally, and thus, I couldn't commit anything. However, I solved it by using sysyadm -C / commit -m [...]; is this the proper way to solve this? In addition, should we therefore set the command sysyadm command to sudo yadm -Y /etc/yadm -C /? It would not work for the init subcommand, but the others should work just fine!

[xeruf]

For anyone curious about permissions and stuff - I had the issue that, when using sudo, I would have had to duplicate my ssh keys to the root user.
So I created a little function that enables pushing and pulling via the local user (and allows specifying an "unignore" file):

alias sysyadm="yadm --yadm-dir /etc/yadm --yadm-data /etc/yadm"
alias sysinit="sysyadm init -b main -w /; sysyadm gitconfig include.path '$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config'"
sy() {
  unignore="/etc/yadm/unignore"
  test -r "$unignore" && cat "$unignore" | envsubst | sysyadm add --intent-to-add --pathspec-from-file=-
  case "$1" in
    ("") sysyadm status;;
    (p) sysyadm push;;
    (l) sysyadm fetch && sy rebase main --onto origin/main;;
    (*) sudo -E $(alias sysyadm | cut -d\' -f2) "$@";;
  esac
  sudo chown -R $USER /etc/yadm
}

[rizzini]

Managing files outside of your home directory isn't really within the standard use-case for yadm.

yadm only manages files within the configured worktree ($HOME by default). Also, yadm will use the effective user for file ownership just like Git.

However, if you wanted to bend yadm into managing system files, I could see doing something like this:

# create an alias to run yadm for system files
alias sysyadm="sudo yadm -Y /etc/yadm"

# initialize the yadm repo using the worktree of "/"
sysyadm init -w /

# continue to use sysyadm for managing system files
sysyadm add /etc/pacman.conf

sysyadm commit -m 'Add pacman.conf'

Assuming you have sudo rights, the sysyadm alias will work as if root was using yadm, having the owner be "root", with the ability to manage any file under /. If you were only interested in managing files under /etc, you could use that as the worktree instead. In the example above, the yadm configuration would be stored in /etc/yadm/config and the repo in /etc/yadm/repo.git.

That solution works just fine. No permission issues here. I just can't encrypt anything, otherwise, I can't boot. I didn't troubleshoot why yet, so I dropped encryption for now. Here's the repository for my system dotfiles -> https://github.com/rizzini/Dotfiles.system

[Animeshz]

Btw, another way I use #407 (comment)

Another way I'm using is to use a simple script syncfiles and call that with a file/folder (incl relative path too), it'll create a absolute path structure and keep the file there at ~/.config/yadm/files. Later on at bootstrapping step we can just rsync -avP it to /.

The only thing missing is that we've to keep track if the file is changed by ourselves there's no git status.

If anybody like to automate the manually copying and directory structure hassle...

[mwoz123]

official FAQ method didn't work for me:

marcin@pc:/$ alias sysyadm="sudo yadm --yadm-dir /etc/yadm --yadm-data /etc/yadm/data"
marcin@pc:/$ sysyadm init -w /
ERROR: Git repo does not exist. did you forget to run 'init' or 'clone'?

neither

marcin@pc:/$ sysyadm init -b main -w /; sysyadm gitconfig include.path '$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config'
ERROR: Git repo does not exist. did you forget to run 'init' or 'clone'?
ERROR: Git repo does not exist. did you forget to run 'init' or 'clone'?

this helped:

marcin@pc:/$ alias sysyadm="sudo yadm -Y /etc/yadm"
marcin@pc:/$ sysyadm init -w /
Initialized empty shared Git repository in /etc/yadm/repo.git/