Second chance: etckeeper

Etckeeper is a useful tool to store /etc in a version control system. It allows you to read the changes that have been made to the files in /etc, document these changes and recover a previous version of a modified file in case we made some changes that we don’t want to keep. It’ s a great system to control your server and find very quickly solutions.

Its installation is very trivial:

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aptitude install etckeeper

Create tracjing repository:

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crunch:~# cd /etc/
crunch:/etc# etckeeper init
Initialized empty Git repository in /etc/.git/
crunch:/etc#etckeeper commit 'Initial Сommit'
crunch:/etc# git gc
Counting objects: 1476, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (1068/1068), done.
Writing objects: 100% (1476/1476), done.
Total 1476 (delta 91), reused 0 (delta 0)

Set some global variables:

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git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email kiwi@zeldor.biz

To show etckeeper’s history:

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git log

To see all changes:

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git log -p