Add etckeeper

Overview

While the LBU mechanism with backups allows restoring to previous state it lacks commented history. Done right, etckeeper will lead to a better record of what changes you made to the configuration and why, which improves your ability to recreate what you did, as well as understand why you did what you did. It also makes it easier to revert broken changes in a more granular fashion.

Configure Git for the root user

This is known as a ‘global’ configuration as ’local’ configuration refers to per-repository configuration.

The following command should be run as root (e.g. prefixed with sudo or doas when in your admin non-root user account).

  1. Make sure apk package list is up to date

    apk update

  2. Add git

    apk add git

  3. Execute the following commands as root, adjusted to suit you and your preferences

    git config --global init.defaultBranch main
git config --global user.name "root@yourserver (Daniel F. Dickinson)" # Obviously you want your name here
git config --global user.email "dfdpublic@wildtechgarden.ca" # Obviously you want your email here
git config --global pull.ff only
git config --global core.fileMode true
git config --global core.eol lf
git config --global core.autocrlf false
git config --global core.editor nano

  4. Repeat for your non-root admin user (without sudo), adjusted to suit your preferences. (Etckeeper uses the configured user.name and user.email of the original user (e.g. the sudo-ing user for non-root admin sudo-ing to root) to set the author and committer fields, so you need to set at least user.email and user.name for each user that will be using etckeeper, even if through sudo).

Install and configure etckeeper

  1. Install etckeeper

    apk add etckeeper

  2. Edit /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf so it has the following snippets in place of the defaults for these items:

    1. Don’t autocommit every day; this just creates noise if we are doing things right

      AVOID_DAILY_AUTOCOMMITS=1

  3. Just avoids a warning that doesn’t help us much

    AVOID_SPECIAL_FILE_WARNING=1

  4. This will require to use etckeeper commit "A message about the commit" before installing with APK, if there are changes to /etc you have not already committed. This makes the logs more useful than the automatic messages that let one be too careless.

    AVOID_COMMIT_BEFORE_INSTALL=1

  5. Add root’s .gitconfig to LBU backups

    lbu add /root/.gitconfig

  6. If your non-root admin user(s) home(s) are not on persistent storage, add those .gitconfig to LBU as well.

Commit your changes

  1. Commit changes to etckeeper

     etckeeper commit "Configure etckeeper"

  2. Commit the changes to LBU (not strictly necessary if you will be doing other changes before committing; just don’t forget to commit to LBU).

    lbu commit

See Also