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A guide for etckeeper

NOTE: This document is incomplete.

Basics

Before apt installs packages, etckeeper pre-install will check that /etc contains no uncommitted changes. After apt installs packages, etckeeper post-install will add any new interesting files to the repository, and commit the changes.
You can also run etckeeper commit by hand to commit changes.
There is also a cron job, that will use etckeeper to automatically commit any changes to /etc each day.

Due to VCS limits on file metadata storage, empty directories, and special files, file metadata is stored separately. Among other chores, etckeeper init sets up a pre-commit hook that stores metadata about file owners and permissions into a /etc/.etckeeper file. This metadata is stored in version control along with everything else. The pre-commit hook also stores information that can be used to recreate the empty directories in the /etc/.etckeeper file.

Most VCS don't support several special files that you probably won't have in /etc, such as unix sockets, named pipes, hardlinked files (but symlinks are fine), and device files. The pre-commit hook will warn if your /etc contains such special files.

etckeeper hooks into apt (and similar systems) so changes to interesting files in /etc caused by installing or upgrading packages will automatically be committed.

You can use any git commands you like, but do keep in mind that, if you check out a different branch or an old version, git is operating directly on your system's /etc. If you do decide to check out a branch or tag, make sure you run etckeeper init again, to get any metadata changes:

Security issues

  • etckeeper is careful about file permissions, and will make sure that repositories it sets up don't allow anyone but root to read their contents.
  • take care when cloning or copying these repositories.
  • the whole .git directory content needs to be kept secret.

Tutorial

It will depends on:

libpython-stdlib libpython2.7-minimal libpython2.7-stdlib python python-minimal 
python2.7 python2.7-minimal python-doc python-tk python2.7-doc binutils 
binfmt-support etckeeper libpython-stdlib libpython2.7-minimal 
libpython2.7-stdlib python python-minimal python2.7 python2.7-minimal

apt install etckeeper
cd /etc
etckeeper init

To commit changes which track the commiting user, use etckeeper instead of raw git command. Raw git command logs root user info on commit, but etckeeper saves who logged as sudo.
Also, it tracks metadata changes.

etckeeper commit "some chaanges"

To save metadata file changes when using git

etckeeper pre-commit
# then
git commit -am "some changes"

Also, .gitignore file like

# new and old versions of conffiles, stored by dpkg
*.dpkg-*
# new and old versions of conffiles, stored by ucf
*.ucf-*

# old versions of files
*.old

# mount(8) records system state here, no need to store these
blkid.tab
blkid.tab.old

# some other files in /etc that typically do not need to be tracked
nologin
ld.so.cache
prelink.cache
mtab
mtab.fuselock
.pwd.lock
*.LOCK
network/run
adjtime
lvm/cache
lvm/archive
X11/xdm/authdir/authfiles/*
ntp.conf.dhcp
.initctl
webmin/fsdump/*.status
webmin/webmin/oscache
apparmor.d/cache/*
service/*/supervise/*
service/*/log/supervise/*
sv/*/supervise/*
sv/*/log/supervise/*
*.elc
*.pyc
*.pyo
init.d/.depend.*
openvpn/openvpn-status.log
cups/subscriptions.conf
cups/subscriptions.conf.O
fake-hwclock.data
check_mk/logwatch.state

# editor temp files
*~
.*.sw?
.sw?
\#*\#
DEADJOE

Source

You can clone etckeeper

cd ~/workspace
git clone git://git.joeyh.name/etckeeper.git