I've got quite a cute way of managing my config files on my VPS that I thought I'd share. As I spend a lot of time fiddling and tweaking, getting the process as streamlined as possible and being able to recover from a bad setting were the primary goals in setting this up.
The inspiration for how this works came from Gitosis. I highly recommend
Garry Dolley's tutorial on how to set it up and for general info. In this short tutorial I assume you're running Gitosis on the same machine you're managing configs for, though it wouldn't be hard at all to change things for other Git repos or remote hosts. I also assume you've got
Monit installed and running, though if you don't, just ignore that part of the tutorial and you'll just have to restart the service yourself to pick up new config changes.
I've recently installed
nginx on
rly.gd, so I'll be taking this as an example. I begin by creating a new repository with Gitosis called
nginx-conf (again, see
Garry Dolley's tutorial for info). Then, I create a git repo in nginx's config dir (
/opt/nginx/conf for me, probably
/etc/nginx for you), add all the files, and commit.
Referring again to the same tutorial, I add the Gitosis repo as the remote origin and push the initial commit.
Then, on my local machine, I clone the repo from Gitosis:
Back on the server, I create a file named
post-update in
/home/git/repositories/nginx-conf.git/hooks, and
chmod it
+x. The following script first deletes the old files (don't worry, you've still got a copy in Gitosis!) then clones the latest version:
This script means that now when you push to the Gitosis repo, it'll update nginx's config to match the latest revision. So now, when you're making edits to your server config, you just need to commit, push, then restart the service. Taking it one step further, we can automate the last step out of the process too, so the service will restart itself. Depending on how your server is set up, you may just be able to add
/etc/init.d/nginx restart to the bottom of your
post-update hook, though it's not a very clean or secure solution. Better is to make Monit watch the config for changes, and restart the service if necessary. Here's a
monitrc entry for nginx:
The bit you're interested in specifically is lines 13–17, where we make Monit watch for changes on
nginx.conf, and make the nginx service depend on its config.
So that's it, a simple but useful little trick to ease configuration changes. I've used this to automate changes to all my important services on all my servers, and it definitely makes life a lot easier!
