Server configuration with Mercurial

I've been playing a lot lately with Mercurial, and in my opinion it's the best SCM around. I also have been administering some of my servers (actually Rackspace VMs) and ran into the age old problem that sys admins have had; keeping the server config synchronised.

The problem in a nutshell is that you install a set of applications (through yum or apt-get or whatever) and configure them. However you run into the problem of config propagation, versioning/history, rolling back to a known configuration, etc. I've seen a few sys admins roll their own solution, usually involving rsync and a lot of logging.

My solution was to use Hg to do all the heavy lifting, with a wrapper bash script that I knocked up very quickly that invokes Hg to version configuration files. It maintains knowledge about where the file came from by copying the file to be relative to the repository directory. For example if a user was to edit /etc/hosts the file will reside in the repository at $REPOS_HOME/etc/hosts

How it works is that you run

$ editconf <file>

the script does the following.

1. Resolves the absolute path of a file (using a realpath bash script that a friend knocked up)


2. Checks if the file exists in the repository




1. If the file doesn't exist the file is copied and added to the repository




3. Drops through to the users editor (defaults to vim)


4. Copies the file to the repository when the user exits the editor


5. Attempts to commit the file

If the user is created for the first time (ommitting the initial check), the script is smart enough to add it first. Mistakes are fixed by leaving an empty commit message (most SCMs wont commit of course), and reverting the file.

Branches can be made, merged, and state can be pushed around various servers with very little effort.

I mentioned this approach to some people and they thought it was a nifty idea and asked me to share my scripts. They can be found on BitBucket under the nesupport[1] SysTools project. They're licensed under the MPL, and since they were knocked up in a hurry patches/feedback are always welcome. Further instructions are found in the scripts themselves (if further action is required).

Further work could include the automated sharing of repository state (cron job) and synchronising what's in the repo with what's on the filesystem.

[1] The code was developed for a project I'm working on with somebody else who agreed to open source our sys admin scripts, of which editconf is a part.