I just discovered a gem called etckeeper, which I’m sure will change the way we’re used to work with server configurations.

The official website describes it pretty well:

etckeeper is a collection of tools to let /etc be stored in a git, mercurial, darcs, or bzr repository. It hooks into apt (and other package managers including yum and pacman-g2) to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades.

All it took me to set it up on my Debian Lenny slice was:

$ aptitude install etckeeper
# aptitude will install Git as the version control system, which is pretty neat!
$ cd /etc/
$ sudo etckeeper init -m "initial commit"
Initialized empty Git repository in /etc/.git/

The best part is that it’ll detect changes made by apt, commit whatever changes you had made previously, and even enable you to make your own commits, after your manual modifications. Do try it out!