Snapper
Snapper is a tool for Linux file system snapshot management. Apart from the obvious creation and deletion of snapshots it can compare snapshots and revert differences between them. In simple terms, this allows root and non-root users to view older versions of files and revert changes.
For more information visit snapper.io.
Development
For compiling and developing Snapper you need to setup the development environment first.
Development Environment
In the SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE distributions you can install the needed packages by using these commands:
# install the basic development environment (SUSE Linux Enterprise, the SDK extension is needed)
sudo zypper install -t pattern SDK-C-C++
# install the basic development environment (openSUSE)
sudo zypper install -t pattern devel_C_C++
# install the extra packages for snapper development (both SLE and openSUSE)
sudo zypper install git libmount-devel dbus-1-devel libacl-devel \
docbook-xsl-stylesheets libxml2-devel libbtrfs-devel
Alternatively you can use a Docker container, see README.Travis.md file for some hints.
Building Snapper
You can download the sources and build Snapper by using these commands:
git clone git@github.com:<your_fork>/snapper.git
cd snapper
make -f Makefile.repo
# parallelize the build using more processors, use plain `make` if it does not work
make -j`nproc`
Installing and Running Snapper
To run the freshly built Snapper use this:
sudo make install
# kill the currently running DBus process if present
sudo killall snapperd
# try your changes (the DBus service is started automatically)
(sudo) snapper ...
Running Tests
Snapper includes some internal unit tests to avoid some bugs and regressions.
The tests are located in the testsuite
subdirectory and you can start them
using the make check
command.
There are also some additional tests in the testsuite-real
subdirectory,
but be careful. These tests really execute snapper commands and they can
destroy your data! Run these tests only in a testing environment!
Releasing
-
Before releasing the Snapper package ensure that the changes made to the package are mentioned in the
package/snapper.changes
file, update also thedists/debian/changelog
file. -
Make sure the units tests still passes (see above).
-
When the version is increased then the Git repo has to be tagged, use the
vX.Y.Z
format for the tag. Also the filesystems:snapper OBS project has to be updated. -
To create the package use command
make package
. Then use the common work-flow to submit the package to the build service. For openSUSE:Factory send at first the package to the devel project filesystems:snapper in OBS.Please note that this OBS project builds for more distributions so more metadata files have to be updated. See the OBS documentation for more info (cross distribution howto, Debian builds).
-
The generated bzip2 tarball has to be also placed at http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/snapper/.
-
When the documentation changes e.g. the man page or an important functionality then also the snapper.io web pages have to be updated. They are hosted as GitHub pages in the gh-pages branch in the Snapper Git repository.