changelog/README.md

# changelog : manage changes on a server

Based on the Masters Book of Serious Sysadmin's Best Practices Chapter, this script aims at unifying and simplifying the management of changelog files on a server.

## Crash course

```
wget https://git.interhacker.space/alban/changelog/raw/branch/master/changelog.sh
chmod +x changelog
sudo -E ./changelog
```

## How it works

The script will ask for your name if no `CHANGELOG_USERNAME` environment variable is found.

Then it will ask for change informations:

* The nature of the change: which software / domain did you change? Why?
* Some comments: How did you do it? What was happening? Is it fixed?

You can then add multiple lines for a single change as well as multiple changes for a changelog entry (ex: deploy a new service and remove old packages).

This changelog entry is now inserted on top of the /etc/changelog file, which is created with a default entry if not present yet.

**Limitations**

* Please note that to enter multiline comments, you have for now to escape newline characters using the `\\\\n` sequence. Ugly.

* By default, it will attempt to create and edit `/etc/changelog`. You better be running it as root, by default.

## Plugins and config

You can add plugins to hook actions at two points in time. The `plugins-available` directory contains two working examples of these hooks.

* adding a changelog entry lines. Example `content-hastebin.sh` plugin pushes a file content to a pastebin service
* saving the changelog. Example `output-changelog-server.sh` plugin pushes a changelog to a remote central server

You can activate the plugins by placing/linking them in the `plugins-enabled` directory.

The plugins might need some configuration variables.

Do `mv config.sample.sh config.sh` and edit the file to suit your needs.



## Baking a fat exec

While providing a mean to run plugins is cool, it's not very efficient at deployment time.

Run `build.sh` to get a single exec, ready for shipping, embedding:

* your config.sh file
* all the plugins you added to plugins-enabled

## Possible improvements

* [x] Enable a sudo requirement / ways to restart oneself as a root user
* [] Enable simple multiline comments
* [x] Provide a way to attach files
* [x] Provide a way (plugins?) to report each change to a central server
* [x] Provide a build system to cook config and plugins in a single exec