Etckeeper
Etckeeper lets you keep /etc under version control.
Contents
Install
Configure
The main config file is /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf
.
You can set things such as the VCS to use in this file.
Once you've set your preferred VCS (the default is git), you can initialize the /etc repository by running
# etckeeper init
Usage
Etckeeper supports using pacman as a LOWLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER
in etckeeper.conf.
Support for using pacman as a HIGHLEVEL_PACKAGER_MANAGER
is not possible since pacman does not have hook capability,
so you'll need to either commit changes manually or use one of the stopgap solutions below.
Cron
There is a cron script in the source distribution at debian/cron.daily
.
You can use this script to automatically commit changes on a schedule.
To make it run daily, for example, make sure you have cron installed and enabled,
then simply copy the script from the srcdir where you built etckeeper to /etc/cron.daily
and make sure it's executable (e.g. chmod +x /path/to/script
).
systemd
Service and timer units are included in the AUR package. The timer can be enabled as follows:
# systemctl enable etckeeper.timer
Wrapper script
In order to emulate the auto-commit functionality that etckeeper has on other systems,
you could place a script such as the one below somewhere in your PATH, make it executable,
and use it instead of pacman -Syu
to update your system.
#!/bin/bash etckeeper pre-install pacman -Syu etckeeper post-install
Alternatively you can add a quick alias to ~/.bashrc
:
alias pkg-update='sudo etckeeper pre-install && sudo pacman -Syu && sudo etckeeper post-install'
or a function where it is possible to specify the arguments for pacman or pacman wrapper:
Pacman () { sudo etckeeper pre-install && sudo pacman "$@" && sudo etckeeper post-install; }
To use the function, just run pacman as usual with flags as needed, but with a capital "P". For example:
Pacman -Syu Pacman -R foo
Incron
As an alternative to the above, you could set up incron to automatically commit changes using etckeeper whenever a file in /etc is modified.
Automatic push to remote repo
Whilst having a local backup in /etc/.git
is a good first step, etckeeper can automatically push your changes on each commit to a remote repository such as Github. Create an executable file /etc/etckeeper/commit.d/40github-push
:
#!/bin/sh set -e if [ "$VCS" = git ] && [ -d .git ]; then cd /etc/ git push origin master fi
Change to etc/.git
and add your remote Github repository:
# git remote add origin https://github.com/user/repo.git
Now each time you run your wrapper script or alias from above, changes will be automatically commited to your Github repo.