ConfigurationManagement¶

Etckeeper¶

Etckeeper seemed a good start to at least be able to track the virtual machine configuration in git and be able to re-deploy it easily.

However it seems to have some limitations (tested with Trisquel 8):

• It expects sysadmins to only use etckeeper for a single directory like /etc/ or maybe /boot for special cases. It doesn't seem well suited for keeping / under git. While some automatic commits can be disabled¹, it will for instance scan the whole directory and populate .etckeeper with many mkdirs. While this is highly desirable for /etc/, because without that some daemons might fail to start, it is clearly not desirable for /. The consequence is that any configuration outside of /etc/ will not be tracked by etckeeper. This behavior is governed by the code in /etc/etckeeper/pre-commit.d/30store-metadata which doesn't contain any way to disable that behavior, and that still needs to run somehow as otherwise some of the permissions will probably not be correct.

¹ It tend to do things automatically, but with AVOID_DAILY_AUTOCOMMITS=1 and AVOID_COMMIT_BEFORE_INSTALL=1 in /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf, and doing chmod -x /etc/etckeeper/init.d/70vcs-add, it won't git add all the files under the directory it manages at boot and will not do automatic commit each days.