Utilizing Git for configuration management

One of the most valuable assets on a server is its configuration. This is second only to the data the server stores. Often, when we implement new technology on a server, we’ll spend a great deal of time editing configuration files all over the server to make it work as best as we can. This can include any number of things, from Apache virtual host files to DHCP server configuration, DNS zone files, and more. If a server were to encounter a disaster from which the only recourse was to completely rebuild it, the last thing we’d want to do is re-engineer all of this configuration from scratch. This is where Git comes in.

In a typical development environment, an application being developed by a team of engineers can be managed by Git, each contributing to a repository that hosts the source code for their software. One of the things that makes Git so useful is how you’re able to go back to previous versions of a file in...