Arch Linux

Neven

Member

Registered: 2014-05-02

Posts: 76

How to manage identical configuration files across multiple PCs/VMs?

Suppose, for example, that I want to configure Systemd's behavior on pressing the machine's power key for all personal Archlinux machines (two laptops in my case).

Creating a file like this in /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d is enough to configure Systemd:

[Login]
HandlePowerKey=suspend

To make this scale across separate machines, I could create a package that would contain this configuration file in /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d, and other ones, too.

This approach has a fatal flaw, though: suppose I want to change my xinit configuration or my vim configuration, so I'm modifying /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc or /etc/vimrc; I can't do this with a package because the files are already owned by existing packages (xorg-xinit or vim-runtime, in this example).

Any ideas?

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 60,670

Re: How to manage identical configuration files across multiple PCs/VMs?

Those are user specific configs anyway and if you want to supply the user w/ a default config on user creation, that's for /etc/skel - or a very popular fashion is to abuse github for that and manage your user configs ("dotfiles") through git.

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WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 12,553

Website

Re: How to manage identical configuration files across multiple PCs/VMs?

Ansible.

Mod note: not Arch discussion, moving to System Administration

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ayekat

Member

Registered: 2011-01-17

Posts: 1,614

Re: How to manage identical configuration files across multiple PCs/VMs?

I'd say system files with "system config packages" and/or config management tools like Ansible, Salt, ….
User configuration with Git or any other VCS (see "dotfiles" in the Arch Wiki or anywhere else online).

Xinit and Vim configuration (and other similar things) are user config, and ideally you don't touch system files for that.

Last edited by ayekat (2022-04-29 10:38:15)

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pkgs │ hacks │ cfg │ blag

Neven

Member

Registered: 2014-05-02

Posts: 76

Re: How to manage identical configuration files across multiple PCs/VMs?

The relevant wiki links are

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dotfiles

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Catego … management