John Fremlin's blog: etckeeper tracking server config

There's an awesome tool to keep UN*X /etc directories under revision control. In theory this is where all the system configuration should be. Of course it tends to leak out, but it's a start :)

One missing piece is the list of installed packages: surely this is the main overview of a systems configuration?

Anyway, that's easy to add to etckeeper, here's the script that I use

set -x
set -e
 
apt-get install -qy etckeeper git
etckeeper uninit -f
perl -pi -e 's/VCS="bzr"/VCS="git"/' /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf 
 
cat > /etc/etckeeper/post-install.d/00-vii-etc-package-list <<EOF
#! /bin/sh
 
etckeeper list-installed > /etc/etckeeper/vii-installed-packages.list
EOF
 
chmod +x /etc/etckeeper/post-install.d/00-vii-etc-package-list
 
etckeeper init

and it's easy to run on a new server with cat ~/Junk/setup-etckeeper.sh | ssh root@newserver bash -s

Of course one could set up chef or puppet or something but with just a handful of machines the goal of better configuration management is not automation but clarity. This is a debugging tool so you can figure out what happened when something broke and potentially helpful for reverting.