When installing, configuring and fine-tuning the software my server runs, many modifications occur.

Applications may tamper with settings when cron jobs run them.

I may tinker with properties in an ini file to improve performances.

Because of these changes, an application on the server may later stop working.

When this happens, I need to figure out what happened and fix it.

Version control tells me what changes intervened.

It's precious information I use to examine the problem.

What is version control?

I'm using git. It's the version control system Linus Torvalds created and it's widely used.

I put together many files, usually containing only text, that I need to build an application or for any other reason.

I tell git to track them.

Every now and then I commit. It means that I tell git to save the files as they currently are. This results in many versions of them.

When the application stops working, git tells me what I modified since the last working version. I will be able to find the difference that crippled it.

Why to use git to control a server's configuration?

If I control my server's configuration using git, I'll fix problems more easily. It's like using git to track application code. It let me know what changed since the last time everything was running smoothly.

When I install a package, it may overwrite one or more configuration files. The package installer may tell me what it's about to change or it may not. I may let the package do its job and forget to check if it will have side-effects. Even if I do check, there may later be undesired effects.

I may edit system files like hosts or fstab to correct a malfunction, but there may later be problems somewhere else.

I may be fine-tuning my server's performance and want to keep the fixes I make to later compare the results.

Users who were able to log in to the server, may not be able do it any more and I suspect that an intruder meddled with ssh-related files.

I may be configuring a website in Nginx or Apache and testing different configurations to find the best one.

I may assign multiple ip addresses to a single network card. This configuration needs to be tested with similar ones running on other servers, maybe remote ones.

I may reduce the property innodb_buffer_pool_size in the file /etc/mysql/my.cnf because MySQL runs all the same and I need memory for another application. This affects a script that runs at night when another system administrator is in charge. The latter will find git very useful because he will know what changed since the last time the now-broken script run correctly.

Why I need to set a couple of environment variables to use git in this scenario

Usually git finds the files it's supposed to track in a single folder.

For example, the files that compose my website https://leadershipcoachfortech.com/ are in the folder /vol/WORKnARCH/SwProjects/leadershipcoachfortech.

But, in this case, I'm using git to track files system-wide.

In the folder /var/spool/cron/crontabs/ there are the crontab files, in /srv/scripts/ there are the scripts cron runs, and /root/.bashrc and /root/.profile contain interesting environment variables.

Git must work from the only folder that encompasses all these files, the folder '/'.

But I don't want the git repository to be in the root folder, it's a messy arrangement.

This means that I need to have the following two variables in the environment.

GIT_DIR=/srv/gitrepo4config
GIT_WORK_TREE=/

The first one tells git where to put the repository, the place where git keeps the history of changes. The second tells git that the files to track are under the folder '/'.

How I set these two environment variables

I run a script before starting to operate on this git repository.

I don't add the variables to files like .bashrc or .profile because I don't want them to affect git operations for the entire system. There may be other git repositories that wouldn't work if these variables are set.

The script is the following one.

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $_ == $0 ]] ; then
   echo "Invoke this script this way: . git-environment-setup.sh"
   echo "First you type git-environment-setup.sh taking advantage of autocomplete"
   echo "Then you go to the beginning of the line and add the '.'"
fi

export GIT_WORK_TREE=/
export GIT_DIR=/srv/gitrepo4config

What git is not supposed to track

The environment variable GIT_WORK_TREE I set above tells git that, potentially, it can track the entire file system. I limit the tracking scope using the file .gitignore git refers to for instructions about what not to track.

Initially, I tell git to track nothing and then I incrementally add folders and files to track.

Here it is the .gitignore file.

# Ignore everything
*
# But descend into directories
# Without this, rules like !/var/spool/cron/** won't work, they wouldn't see the subfolders
!*/

# Get rid of any git repo may be present in sub-directories
/root/.wp-cli
/root/drush-backups
/srv/sites/intranet.emanuelesantanche.com
/srv/sites/rankit.emanuelesantanche.com
/usr/lib/nodejs

# Folders to track

# Remember the double '*' otherwise you don't get sub-directories
# Entire /etc 
!/etc/**
# Crontab files
!/var/spool/cron/crontabs/**
# Scripts
!/srv/scripts/**
# Ssh folder
!/root/.ssh/**
# Rclone makes a backup to Google Nearline Storage
!/root/.config/rclone/**

# Files to track
!/root/.bashrc
!/root/.profile

# Files to ignore
# Had to ignore this file because it contains a token that changes every day
/root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf

# This section is from the etckeeper package
# It ignores many files in the /etc folder

# new and old versions of conffiles, stored by apt/rpm
*.rpmnew
*.rpmorig
*.rpmsave

# old versions of files
*.old

# mount(8) records system state here, no need to store these
blkid.tab
blkid.tab.old

# some other files in /etc that typically do not need to be tracked
nologin
ld.so.cache
prelink.cache
mtab
mtab.fuselock
.pwd.lock
*.LOCK
network/run
adjtime
lvm/cache
lvm/archive
X11/xdm/authdir/authfiles/*
ntp.conf.dhcp
.initctl
webmin/fsdump/*.status
webmin/webmin/oscache
apparmor.d/cache/*
service/*/supervise/*
service/*/log/supervise/*
sv/*/supervise/*
sv/*/log/supervise/*
*.elc
*.pyc
*.pyo
init.d/.depend.*
openvpn/openvpn-status.log
cups/subscriptions.conf
cups/subscriptions.conf.O
fake-hwclock.data
check_mk/logwatch.state

# editor temp files
*~
.*.sw?
.sw?
\#*\#
DEADJOE

# end section from etckeeper

root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/# git init

root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/# git add -A --dry-run

root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/# git add -A

root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/# git commit -m "First version"

root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/# git status

root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/# git diff

root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/# git add -A
root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/# git commit -m "Comment describing the changes"

#!/bin/sh

export GIT_WORK_TREE=/
export GIT_DIR=/srv/gitrepo4config

git status -s

40 7 *  * * /srv/scripts/check-systemwide-git-repo.sh

#!/bin/bash

export GIT_WORK_TREE=/
export GIT_DIR=/srv/gitrepo4config

PATH_GIT_STATUS_OUTPUT=/tmp/`basename $0`-git-status.out

git status -s >$PATH_GIT_STATUS_OUTPUT

# If there are changes, I cat the output file from git status
# so that the server will send it to me
# I also automatically add the changes and commit

if [[ -s $PATH_GIT_STATUS_OUTPUT ]] ; then
   cat $PATH_GIT_STATUS_OUTPUT
   git add -A
   git commit -m "Auto commit"
fi

root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/# export EDITOR=nano
root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/# git commit --amend