At work I’ve stumbled across the problem to save configuration files of some Linux servers I am administrating. Since I am a developer I am familiar to GIT and thus I wanted to use the benefits of GIT to solve this problem.

There are several solutions to use GIT for a config file backup. The most obvious one would be to use a git repository directly in /etc (like etckeeper does), but there are some disadvantages with this method:

  • the whole /etc will be stored and not only the relevant ones
  • not all configuration files are in /etc (e.g. some services have their configs in /opt)
  • you could bring wrong versions of the config files via git pull from the upstream repo into the live /etc

I’ve decided to use another approach: I wrote a script which copies all specified files/folders from a separate config file to a temporary folders which contains the git repository. This approach solves the shortcomings from above:

  • only specified files will be backed up
  • we can use any file from the file system
  • git pull cannot destroy productive config files

For this approach you simply need one script and a config file called config_files.txt which contains a list of all files to be backed up. The script does a cleanup of the temporary folder and copies all relevant config files:

1
2
3
4

#!/bin/bash

find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 ! -regex "./\(config_files.txt\|.git\|copy.sh\)" | xargs rm –r
cat config_files.txt | xargs -I {} cp -- parents -R {} .

Having this script, you can set up a backup of your config files with a few commands:

  1. create the temporary folder:

    1

     / $ mkdir –p /backup/conf

  2. create the git repository inside the temporary folder

    1
2
3

     / $ cd /backup/conf
 /backup/conf $ git init
 /backup/conf $ git remote add origin <path to git repo>

  3. add the file config_files.txt to the temporary folder containing a list of files/folders to backup. E.g.

    1
2

     /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
 /etc/nginx/conf.d/

  4. execute the copy script inside the backup folder

    1

     /backup/conf $ copy_conf.sh

  5. check if config files have been changed since your last commit

    1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

     /backup/conf $ git status
 On branch master
 Initial commit

 Untracked files:
 (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

     config_files.txt
     etc/

 nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

  6. commit/push the new backup

    1
2

     /backup/conf $ git commit
 /backup/conf $ git push