As a new user of Fossil, I'm curious if there are any negative implications with using Fossil to store things like /etc/, /usr/local/etc files from Unix like systems like FreeBSD & OpenBSD. If I'm doing this for multiple systems, I think I'd create a branch with each hostname to track those files.
Q1: Have you done this? Do you prefer a different VCS to handle the system files?
Q2: Lots of changes have happened in Fossil over the years and I'm curious if it's possible to restrict who can merge branches with trunk. From reading earlier threads it wasn't possible but there are two workarounds:
a) tell people not to merge to trunk
b) have people clone and trunk maintainer pick up changes from their repo
System configuration files stored in /etc, /var or /usr/local/etc can generally only edited by the root user. But since root has complete access to the whole system, a mistaken command there can have dire consequences.
For that reason I generally use another location to keep edited configuration files, a directory in my home-directory that I call setup, which is under control of git. Since I have multiple machines running FreeBSD, each machine gets its own subdirectory. There is a special subdirectory of setup called shared for those configuration files that are used on multiple machines. Maintaining multiple copies of identical files in separate repositories or even branches can be a lot of extra work.
My workflow is the following;
Edit a configuration file in my repository.
Copy it to its proper location.
Test the changes. If problems occur, go back to step 1.
Commit the changes to the revision control system. Copy the
committed files to their proper location.
Initially I had a shell script (basically a list of install commands) to install the files for me. But I also wanted to see the differences between the working tree and the installed files.
So for my convenience, I wrote a script called deploy to help me with this. It can tell me which files in the repo are different from the installed files and can show me the differences. It can also install files to their proper locations.
From my research I understand that VirtualBox synced folders have permissions set up during the mounting process. Later, I am unable to change it therefore permissions for the whole synced folder MUST be same for every single file/folder in the shared folder. When trying to change with or without superuser permissions, changes are reverted straight away.
How this can work with for example Symfony PHP framework where there are several different permissions for different files/folders? (i.e. app/console needs execute rights but I don't want to have 7XX everywhere).
I have found in different but similar question (Vagrant and symfony2) that I could set the permissions to 777 for everything in the Vagrantfile, however this is not desirable as I need to use GIT behind my source code which is than deployed to the live environment. Running everything under 777 in the production is, nicely put, not correct.
How do you people cope with this? What are yours permissions setups?
A possible solution could be using the rsync synced folder strategy, along with the vagrant rsync and vagrant rsync-auto commands.
In this way you'll lose bidirectional sync, but you can manage file permission and ownership.
I am in a similar situation. I started using Vagrant mount options, and found out that as I upgraded parts of my tech stack (Kernel, Virtualbox, Vagrant, Guest Additions) I started getting different behavior while trying to set permissions in synced folders.
At some point, I was perfectly fine updating a few of the permissions in my shell provisioner. At first, the changes were being reflected in the guest and the host. At another point in time, it was being done the way I expected, with the changes being reflected only in the guest and not the host file-system. After updating the kernel and VB on my host, I noticed that permission changes in the guest are being reflected on the host only.
I was trying to use DKMS to compile VBOX against an older version of my Kernel. No luck yet.
Now when I have little more experience, I can actually answer this question.
There are 3 solution to this problem:
Use Git in your host system because vagrant basic shared folders setup somehow forces 777 (at least on Windows hosts)
Use NFS shared folders option from the vagrant (not available on Windows out of the box)
Configure more complex rsync as mentioned in Emyl's answer (slower sync speeds).
I've setup a Vagrant box that runs my webserver to host my Symfony2 application.
Everything works fine except the folder synchronization.
I tried 2 things:
config.vm.synced_folder LOCALFOLDER, HOSTFOLDER
config.vm.synced_folder LOCALFOLDER, HOSTFOLDER, type="rsync"
Option 1: First option works, I actually don't know how file is shared but it works.
Files are copied in both way, but the application is SUPER slow.
Symfony is generating cache files which might be the issue, but I don't really know how to troubleshoot this and see what is happening.
Option 2: Sync is only done in one way (from my local machine to the vagrant box), which covers most of the case and is fast.
Issue is that when I use symfony command line on the vagrant box to generate some files they are not copied over to my local machine.
My question is:
What is the best way to proceed with 2 ways syncing? With option 1 how can I (as it might be the issue) exclude some files from syncing.
With Option 2 how can I make sure changes on remote are copied to my local machine?
If default synced folder strategy (VirtualBox shared folders, I imagine) is slow for your use case, you can choose a different one and, if you need, maintain the two-way sync:
If your host OS is Linux or Mac OS X, you can go with NFS.
If your host OS is Windows you can instead choose SMB.
Rsync is very fast but, as you've pointed out, is one-way only.
As it doesn't seem Vagrant offers a "built-in" way to do this here is what I did:
Configure Vagrant RSYNC folder on the folders that will contains application generated files (in Symfony2 it is your Bundle/Entity folder). Note that I didn't sync the root folder because some folders doesn't have to be rsynced (cache/logs...) and also because it was taking way too much time for the rsync process to parse all the folders/subfolders when I know that only the Entity folder will be generated.
As the Rsync has to be done from the Vagrant box to the host, I use vagrant-rsync-back plugin and thus run this manually everytime I use a command that generates code.
https://github.com/smerrill/vagrant-rsync-back#getting-started
Create an watcher on my local machine that will track any change in code and rsync it to the vagrant box.
https://gist.github.com/laurentlemaire/e423b4994c7452cddbd2
Vagrant mounts your project root as /vargrant folder inside box as 2 way share.
You can run your command there do get required files synced. Any I/O will be damn slow (like you already mentioned), however you will get your files. For other stuff use your 1-way synced folder.
I have 2 parallel Drupal Web Servers running (serving for one Drupal Instance together) and now i need to install NFS. My experience in multi Drupal Servers is, each Drupal Instance (Server) uses their own Aggregated JS + CSS files (storing in: sites/default/files/js and sites/default/files/css folders) which can NOT be used as common. (Files can not be the same for both Servers. They use their own ones.)
Based on these issues, my questions are:
How NFS actually works between Multi Drupal Servers?
Which directories will be/need to be shared between?
What will happen to Aggregated Files?
What will happen to Web User Uploads paths and files? (Need any configuration in Drupal?)
Can anyone share these knowledge/experience please?
You can definitively work with NFS and Drupal.
I do not understand why you do not want to share the files directory between both.
In fact you have two solutions:
1) Share all the source tree, starting at the web directory root, or even earlier if you have external directories for private files
2) Share only the moving directories and have all code based synchronised before and aftter any upgrade via some rsync commands. In this case you need to share between servers:
the files directories (project/www/site/default/files, project/www/site//files)
the private files directories (project/private) <-- it's an example
the php temporary upload path (project/tmp for example), check that both servers use the right folder (it's a php setting) and that this folder is shared.
before Drupal7 I would use solution 1, now the number of internal filesystem tree traversal launched by Drupal on a lot of occasion make it very bad on slow filesystem (and NFS is usually quite slow). Using APC with all filesystem check disabled (apc.stat, stat.ctime, etc) does not prevent Drupal from trying to access every file on your filesystem on a lot of occasions. So solution 2 is to be prefered.
I did not experience any problems with file aggregation with such installations.
Like most *nix people, I tend to play with my tools and get them configured just the way that I like them. This was all well and good until recently. As I do more and more work, I tend to log onto more and more machines, and have more and more stuff that's configured great on my home machine, but not necessarily on my work machine, or my web server, or any of my work servers...
How do you keep these config files updated? Do you just manually copy them over? Do you have them stored somewhere public?
I've had pretty good luck keeping my files under a revision control system. It's not for everyone, but most programmers should be able to appreciate the benefits.
Read
Keeping Your Life in Subversion
for an excellent description, including how to handle non-dotfile configuration (like cron jobs via the svnfix script) on multiple machines.
I also use subversion to manage my dotfiles. When I login to a box my confs are automagically updated for me. I also use github to store my confs publicly. I use git-svn to keep the two in sync.
Getting up and running on a new server is just a matter of running a few commands. The create_links script just creates the symlinks from the .dotfiles folder items into my $HOME, and also touches some files that don't need to be checked in.
$ cd
# checkout the files
$ svn co https://path/to/my/dotfiles/trunk .dotfiles
# remove any files that might be in the way
$ .dotfiles/create_links.sh unlink
# create the symlinks and other random tasks needed for setup
$ .dotfiles/create_links.sh
It seems like everywhere I look these days I find a new thing that makes me say "Hey, that'd be a good thing to use DropBox for"
Rsync is about your best solution. Examples can be found here:
http://troy.jdmz.net/rsync/index.html
I use git for this.
There is a wiki/mailing list dedicated to the topic.
vcs-home
I would definetly recommend homesick. It uses git and automatically symlinks your files. homesick track tracks a new dotfile, while homesick symlink symlinks new dotfiles from the repository into your homefolder. This way you can even have more than one repository.
You could use rsync. It works through ssh which I've found useful since I only setup new servers with ssh access.
Or, create a tar file that you move around everywhere and unpack.
I store them in my version control system.
i use svn ... having a public and a private repository ... so as soon as i get on a server i just
svn co http://my.rep/home/public
and have all my dot files ...
I store mine in a git repository, which allows me to easily merge beyond system dependent changes, yet share changes that I want as well.
I keep master versions of the files under CM control on my main machine, and where I need to, arrange to copy the updates around. Fortunately, we have NFS mounts for home directories on most of our machines, so I actually don't have to copy all that often. My profile, on the other hand, is rather complex - and has provision for different PATH settings, etc, on different machines. Roughly, the machines I have administrative control over tend to have more open source software installed than machines I use occasionally without administrative control.
So, I have a random mix of manual and semi-automatic process.
There is netskel where you put your common files on a web server, and then the client program maintains the dot-files on any number of client machines. It's designed to run on any level of client machine, so the shell scripts are proper sh scripts and have a minimal amount of dependencies.
Svn here, too. Rsync or unison would be a good idea, except that sometimes stuff stops working and i wonder what was in my .bashrc file last week. Svn is a life saver in that case.
Now I use Live Mesh which keeps all my files synchronized across multiple machines.
I put all my dotfiles in to a folder on Dropbox and then symlink them to each machine. Changes made on one machine are available to all the others almost immediately. It just works.
Depending on your environment you can also use (fully backupped) NFS shares ...
Speaking about storing dot files in public there are
http://www.dotfiles.com/
and
http://dotfiles.org/
But it would be really painful to manually update your files as (AFAIK) none of these services provide any API.
The latter is really minimalistic (no contact form, no information about who made/owns it etc.)
briefcase is a tool to facilitate keeping dotfiles in git, including those with private information (such as .gitconfig).
By keeping your configuration files in a git public git repository, you can share your settings with others. Any secret information is kept in a single file outside the repository (it’s up to you to backup and transport this file).
-- http://jim.github.com/briefcase
mackup
https://github.com/lra/mackup
Ira/mackup is a utility for Linux & Mac systems that will sync application preferences using almost any popular shared storage provider (dropbox, icloud, google drive). It works by replacing the dot files with symlinks.
It also has a large library of hundreds of applications that are supported https://github.com/lra/mackup/tree/master/mackup/applications