I’m about to reinstall my system (changing disks and wanting to change root FS) and would like to collect the current configuration of my system so I can get back up and running as soon as possible.
I’m looking to implement some sort of Configuration as Code in the near future to better document changes I make.
Is there an easy way of collecting the configuration I’ve done since my first installation ~9 months ago?
I think the only stuff in /etc I’ve touched is around network configuration, but I’m not 100% sure
Configuration in my home directory I’m not really worried about - that’ll be in a zpool with snapshots and backups
How can I get a list of package that I’ve installed? I’m not interested in capturing “base” packages that come with Manjaro, or dependencies. Just stuff I’ve explicitly installed.
Probably worth noting here that I’m on stable, and use yay to install packages from wherever they come from - Manjaro, Arch, community, AUR…I generally don’t pay too much attention to where packages are coming from.
List of all explicitly installed packages (more options for customize list described here):
pacman -Qqet > packagelist.txt
but here still will be some default packages. Probably the best solution would be comparing this list with default list (it’s list for KDE) and remove repeats with script.
You can look into logs to see what changes you did. But it may be hard to do if you don’t know (at least approximately) when and what changed.
pacman -Qqen: Repo packages installed explicitly. pacman -Qqem: Alien (AUR) packages explicitly installed. pacreport from pacutils has some good info to peruse. sudo pacman -Qii | awk '/^MODIFIED/ {print $2}': provides a list of files changed in /etc.