etcfiles

Use version control to manage your /etc files.

Setup

On the admin client, gain password-less root access to your server:
```
 ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@server
```
On the server, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set
```
 PermitRootLogin without-password
```

On the server do

 cd /etc
 git init
 git submodule add git://github.com/tagae/etcfiles.git .bin
 git submodule update --recursive --init
 git submodule foreach --recursive 'git checkout master'
 git commit --message "Started versioning /etc."

To enable auto-merging of edits to the master branch, do

 cd .git/hooks
 ln -s ../../.bin/etcfiles-post-receive-hook post-receive

On the admin client do

 cd local-etc
 git init
 git remote add server ssh://root@server.org/etc
 git fetch --all
 git checkout -t server/edits

The last step won't work until you import at least one file using etcfiles-import.

Workflow

Tracking new configuration files

On the server, do

/etc/.bin/etcfiles-import <file>

Before importing a file on the server, make sure your VISUAL environment variable is configured properly, so that you can edit the commit message.

Editing configuration files

On the admin client, do

git pull

commit your edits, and finish with

git push

to send the changes to the server. A remote hook will merge those changes with the master branch, so that they are effective immediately.

Updating etcfiles installation

To be explained.

Cleanup

To remove version tracking from the server, do

cd /etc
rm -rf .git .gitmodules README.md .bin