Simple file patching with sed
Patching configuration files is like the bread-and-butter job of every configuration management. In our package-based deployment world we try to minimize the patching to the absolute minimum, usually to "enable" modularized configuration patterns.
The best example is the Apache Webserver, where we have a wrapper RPM package with a %post script that simply replaces (and not patches) the upstream configuration with a few include lines:
Sadly there is still a lot of software that does not support includes in its configuration. For these we of course have to patch the existing configuration and use this short and simple config patcher in our RPM %post scripts, for example like this for sshd_config:
The trick of this snippet is that in the end the changed parts are always at the top of the file. It is also important to always embed some information about the cause of the patch so that one can easily find out who or what is reponsible for the file. The %-variables are filled in by RPM and provide precise information about which package caused this change.
The best example is the Apache Webserver, where we have a wrapper RPM package with a %post script that simply replaces (and not patches) the upstream configuration with a few include lines:
Sadly there is still a lot of software that does not support includes in its configuration. For these we of course have to patch the existing configuration and use this short and simple config patcher in our RPM %post scripts, for example like this for sshd_config:
The trick of this snippet is that in the end the changed parts are always at the top of the file. It is also important to always embed some information about the cause of the patch so that one can easily find out who or what is reponsible for the file. The %-variables are filled in by RPM and provide precise information about which package caused this change.
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