I have quite a few self-hosted services, both on machines at home and on a VPS. And there are even more odds and ends I’ve written that do things on my home network. A one-person maintenance team runs into serious memory limitations, particularly for the services that just run fine for years at a time.
After running into the frustration of forgetting how to run Nextcloud upgrades on the command line for the nth time, I realized it was time to write a tool.
The system wayfinder is what came out of that frustration. It lets you leave notes and commands in place around your infrastructure. After dogfooding it a bit, I was delighted when it saved me a ton of trouble dealing with one of my docker containers.
I took some time to work on it proper, wrote it up, and put it on GitHub, even though it is still a pre-release. Would you use a tool like this? What else would you want in it?
Edit: adding link to GitHub https://github.com/robbieh/way
Maybe! How is it better than keeping a README?
If it’s just a command, I put it in a readme. If it’s a series of commands, I put it in a shell script. What would your tool bring to the party, and if I’m going to turn to a third party solution, why shouldn’t I use Salt or Puppet instead?
For just a couple of reasons. One is the shell integration to remind me that the notes are there. The other is making it a standard tool with standard formats and expectations. I find there’s a little bit of magic in that.
As for Salt and such systems, this is way far away from anything like that. It is not intended to run your infrastructure for you.
Publish that puppy. It can’t hurt.
Don’t do it in github, though. Sourcehut is better; or if you crave that cluttered, JS-heavy feel, Gitlab.
why not codeberg? kind of lightweight on JS, but especially compared to gitlab.
Thanks for the reminder. I already had it in GitHub so I edited the post and added the link. I’ll check out Sourcehut. Hadn’t used it before.
Hey, cool idea! I’ve also got a bunch of dockers and services running on a swarm on multiple devices. Like any good project, it’s on it’s like 3rd or 4th iteration now, having run into some roadblock each time. I structure most of my services into stacks. For example, I have a stack for proxy, www, monitoring, and of course the 'ol arr stack. Anyways, I keep all my notes on the stack compose yaml files that seems to work for me. I only interact with docker on the cli because portainer wants me to pay to use docker swarm. But because I’m so adept at docker on the cli, I have recently stumbled across gemini-cli. Dude, having that to help trouble shoot docker stuff is amazing. It’s really good, but I’d keep it on a short leash.
The article doesn’t explain how way exit works
:wayq!
This is really cool. I maintain a lot of systems that have to be worked on from time to time by far less experienced techs than myself (due to our relationship with the business partners that use the systems) and this sort of thing could be amazing for providing a kind of inline user manual.
Hah! I hadn’t thought about that. I’ll consider how to make it better for that situation. A client/server mode was already being considered, and that might be a good fit.
