etckeeper is a collection of tools to let /etc be stored in a git, mercurial, darcs, or bzr repository. It hooks into apt (and other package managers including yum and pacman-g2) to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades. It tracks file metadata that revison control systems do not normally support, but that is important for /etc, such as the permissions of /etc/shadow. It's quite modular and configurable, while also being simple to use if you understand the basics of working with revision control.

etckeeper is available in git at git://git.kitenet.net/etckeeper, or in gitweb. It's packaged in Debian; packages for other distributions are forthcoming.

News

etckeeper 0.42 released with these changes

  • Deal with removal of the cache directory. Closes: #559418
  • Add ucf backups to ignore list. (See #462355)
  • Add webmin fsdump status files to ignore list. Closes: #567000
  • Add *.old to ignore list (See #462355)
  • Add *.elc to ignore list (See #491401)
  • Add ntp.conf.dhcp and X11/xdm/authdir/authfiles/* to ignore list. Closes: #491401
  • Fix handling of "#*#" ignores for git and hg.
  • Add runit and daemontools supervise files to ignore list. Closes: #529253
Posted at teatime on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

etckeeper 0.41 released with these changes

  • Change etckeeper uninit to not remove .gitignore (etc) file if it lacks the "managed by etckeeper" comment. Closes: #545137
  • Fix hgrc setup code to not warn if the hgrc already contains a call to etckeeper. (Thanks, Jakov Sosic)
  • Updated Czech debconf translation from Miroslav Kure. Closes: #546411
Posted at teatime on Saturday, September 26th, 2009

etckeeper 0.40 released with these changes

  • Add Spanish debconf translation. Closes: #539589
  • Updated Italian debconf translation. Closes: #540516
  • Avoid infinite loop when displaying message about failure to commit changes in /etc. Closes: #540596
Posted late Saturday evening, August 8th, 2009