I’m trying to find a better solution to manage configuration files, both user’s dotfiles and system files in /etc. I’m running an ubuntu server where I have a bunch services with custom configurations, and systemd drop-in files, but on top of that I also have some scripts and user dotfiles that I need to track.

What I’m doing right now is that I have a folder full of symlinks in the admin user’s directory (poor username choice, btw) and I’m using bindfs to mount this directory inside a git repository, this way git won’t see them as symlinks, and will version them as regular files. The problem with doing this is that as git deletes and rewrites files, bindfs fails to track the changes and converts the symlink to regular files.

I looked into chezmoi, but that is only meant to track user dotfiles and will refuse to add a file from /etc, that is unless doing some extra work. But even so, chezmoi will not track the user:group of files, so I would still have to manage that manually.

I also looked into GNU Stow, and that would not complain about files from /etc or anywhere, but it similarly will not track permissions and I would have to manage that manually.

I see that some people are using ansible to manage dotfiles, but at that point, it would make sense to just migrate to ansible, except I don’t want to rebuild my server from scratch to use ansible. Also it looks like a lot to learn.

Is there a better solution I’m not seeing? Maybe something using git hooks?