The following was done on Fedora 14. Keep in mind that the Etckeeper and git specific actions will be similar on whatever platform you’re on.
Simply put, Etckeeper automatically revisions your /etc folder. Allows you to compare, commit and revert the changes that have been made. It’ll also allow you to restore files, should you be unlucky and delete them. Once etckeeper is installed, it will work together with your package manager and cron to do its work. To manage all this you’ll use the commands that your chosen VCS (Version Control System).
Etckeeper supports Git, Bazaar, Darcs and Mercurial.
Use of Etckeeper
Installation
yum install etckeeper
Initialization
etckeeper init
Initial commit
etckeeper commit "initial commit"
Once this is done, etckeeper will make sure that every time you use the package manager (YUM) changes will be recorded. There are however a few git related commands you should be aware of.
Useful and necessary commands
Note: All of these commands assumes your current path is /etc
Viewing the Git log
git log
Check if there’s any modified files
git status
Complete status overview
git log --stat --summary
Revert a change
git revert
View changes you haven’t commited yet
git diff
List different commits, each on one line.
git log --pretty=oneline
Revert to latest change-set, discarding changes
git reset --hard
Re-enter commit message
git commit --amend
Have at it folks!
