Storing your Raspberry Pi’s configuration files in Git is a great way to protect yourself from really bad accidents. You get a backup of all your configs and revision control to rollback those nasty changes. Best of all, you don’t have to manually create backup copies of each individual file. (cp rc.conf rc.conf.bak anyone?)

I should note that I’m running Arch Linux ARM, but this should apply fairly equally to Debian and other distros.

First, install Git (if you haven’t already).

> pacman -Sy git

Arch has a convention of storing all configuration files in /etc. So we will initialize our Git repo there.

> cd /etc
> git init

We only want to store the configuration files that we’ve actually changed in Git. We’ll use a .gitignore file for that.

> vim .gitignore

Here is what mine looks like right now.

# Blacklist everything.
*

# Whitelist the files we care about.
!rc.conf
!rc.local
!ntp.conf
!resolv.conf

!ddclient/
!ddclient/ddclient.conf

!nginx/
!nginx/conf/
!nginx/conf/nginx.conf

The ! prefix negates the pattern, basically creating a whitelist. Cool, huh?

Now we can do our initial commit.

> git add -A
> git commit -m "Added initial configs."

Remember to add any new config files to your .gitignore file and always commit your changes!

For added security you should push your repository to a remote. BitBucket offers free private repositories, if you don’t have a paid Github account.