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

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

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