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
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.