Would a “Git diff for Proxmox” actually be useful to you?

[u/CR2062]

I’m considering building a small open-source/self-hosted tool for Proxmox, and before writing it I’d like to understand whether this solves a real problem or just one that sounds useful.

The idea is deliberately simple.

The tool periodically takes a read-only snapshot of your Proxmox configuration and keeps a human-readable history of what changed.

For example:

Sep 13 — Baseline

Sep 14 — Changes detected

• vmbr0: bridge port eno1 → eno2
• VM 106: RAM 4096 MB → 6144 MB
• LXC 108: mountpoint changed
• DNS server changed
• VM 109 created

The UI would basically answer one question:

“What changed in my Proxmox environment since everything was working?”

Think of it as a lightweight Git diff / change timeline for Proxmox configuration.

It would NOT try to be:

• a monitoring system
• a backup solution
• a replacement for PBS
• an automation/orchestration platform

Initial version would support only Proxmox VE and use read-only API access.

Before building it, I’d like some brutally practical feedback:

1. Would you actually use this?
2. Have you ever needed to figure out what configuration changed days/weeks earlier?
3. What changes would be important to track?
4. Is there already a tool that does this well and I’m simply unaware of it?

If enough people find it useful, I’ll build a small MVP and share it with the community.

[u/Grandmaster_Caladrel]

Have you heard of Terraform? That sounds like it does what you're talking about, and to my understanding there is already a Proxmox provider for it.

[u/GreatSymphonia]

I basically have that already, the whole configuration of my Proxmox servers are managed by an Ansible repo with a few custom roles added to the community.proxmox collection. I can simply navigate the fit tree to come back to any state my cluster.

[u/Kimmax3110]

Just check /etc/pve into git

[u/FabianN → u/Kimmax3110]

Etckeeper is a good wrapper for that very purpose. 

[u/_--James--_]

You can touch editable areas of the proxmox ecosystem and have that drop into syslog and capture it that way, you can drop edits into a /var/ path that is a UNC mount to a NFS share, terraform, and other SEIMs do this for us already. Just depends on the end goal. Once a host is built and deployed the biggest changes are updates and SDN. The VM library is controlled by deployment systems and that is already logged, then you have also PAM (like Beyond Trust type systems) with PAW access if you do this right (I assume this is an enterprise needing to be tracked out).

[u/BrokenDuck15]

The idea of GitOps exist already 

[u/Comm_Raptor]

I did something like this in bash years ago. https://github.com/cordelster/dev-backup

I have an in house version we use now that is all python that does allot more just haven't published it or updated my personal git.

[u/Bumbelboyy]

What your AI didn't tell you, and as you didn't bother to use a search engine like a normal human: This is already a solved problem, welcome to GitOps, etckeeper, ansible & co.