cfgtrack: A simpel tool that tracks and reports diffs in files between invocations.

Tuesday, July 5th, 2016

Sometimes other people change configurations on machines that I help administer. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know when they changed something or what they changed. There are many tools available to track configuration changes, but most are way overpowered. As a result they require too much time to set up and configure properly. All I want is a notification when things have changed, and a Unified Diff of what changes were made. I don’t even care who made the changes.

So I wrote cfgtrack:

cfgtrack tracks and reports diffs in files between invocations.

It lets you add directories and files to a tracking list by keeping a separate copy of the file in a tracking directory. When invoked with the ‘compare’ command, it outputs a Diff of any changes made in the configuration file since the last time you invoked with the ‘compare’ command. It then automatically updates the tracked file. It can also send an email with the diff attached.

It’s super simple to install and use. There are packages for:

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Other Debian-derivatives
• Redhat  CentOs and other Redhat-derived systems
• Platform independant tarbals and zipfiles.

Install one of the packages (see the README for instructions).

Specify something to track:

$ sudo cfgtrack /etc/
Now tracking /etc/

Show difference between the last compare, put those difference in the archive (/var/lib/cfgtrack/archive) and send an email to the admin with the diff attached:

$ sudo cfgtrack -a -m admin@example.com compare

For more info, see the project page on github.