The Sys Admin's Daily Grind: Etckeeper

Fountain of Youth

Article from Issue 189/2016
Author(s):

Configuration files change over the life of almost every Linux system, but not always for the better. Sometimes individual /etc files literally degenerate. Don't despair: You can restore a state from better days.

Etckeeper is part of many distributions and is otherwise available from GitHub [1]. Of course, Git also needs to be installed on the computer. Anyone who hasn't used Git on their system should configure a few fundamental settings:

git config --global user.name "Charly"
git config --global user.email "charly@example.com"
git config --global core.editor "vim"

Because I execute the etckeeper and git commands with sudo, these settings prevent the root user from being entered as a committer.

[...]

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