Submitted 2 hours ago by illusionist@lemmy.zip to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I usually connect with my server via ssh in a terminal and run basic commands. What’s a better, more efficient and modern way of doing that? Especially considering ai and documentation along the way? I wonder if there’s a better approach than “connect from remote and act local”. Is there a method to “code local and push to remote”?
I use a fedora server with podman, caddyfile and vi.
Ansible to deploy services in docker compose stacks and backups with resticprofile.
I use ssh with tmux
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 56 minutes ago Nothing wrong with good old ssh. My VMs are different enough that building and maintaining ansible playbooks or something similar would be a bigger task than actually doing it in the traditional way. Maybe I could benefit by building simple playbooks to populate user accounts, ssh keys, smtp relay settings and other common things, but I don’t really set up new servers that often that it would justify spending time to set up tools for that.
I wait for something to break. Then I yell “God fucking dammit, I don’t have time for this right now!” and spend an hour triaging things before I just try docker down, pull, up and everything works.
nixos, mostly. It has a very steep learning curve but if it breaks I’m just “whatever, rollback now, fix properly later”.
“code local and push remote” is only more efficient if you have a faulty connection with ssh or want to use a GUI editor that doesn’t support remote connections. What you’re doing is good. You can scoure for more “modern” ways that might have more glimmer and sparkly lights, but it won’t improve efficiency.
Ansible is one way to “code local, push to remote(s)”. Can define so-called playbooks, which is basically just a script, to do reoccuring tasks like e.g. updates.
Ansible is great, I just wish it would automatically cleanup when I remove parts of the config. I know it’s not the goal, but I dream about a tool that works this way
I created git repos on my main workstation for each homelab server/service I maintain that keeps:
I just point a local LLM (offline model that runs on my workststion) into those repos and ask it to perform certain things on those servers.
I have it run pre backups before making changes, then post backups once its done.
with dokplpy
Hermes + maybe $5-10 worth of tokens (on a busy month). Running everything in a nice podlet setup and have reduced maintenance down to trivial levels.
I looked that up and am astonished that you let an agent range free on your server?!
I bet you I do less work and have a more efficient and locked down network, file permissions, fully rootless, updated on the hour, 100% in code, and observable setup than 98% of you just running sudo apt upgrade and praying. But yeah, my little agent working in an nemoclaw sandbox is going to go rogue and destroy my server somehow and I definitely believe the AI hype bros that are definitely “accidentally “ are hacking orgs and not going to end the human race🙄
Man, the ignorance and prejudice over how llm work is insane.
Ansible and terraform can bath do with you want though for a single server I’d consider them both to be a somewhat overkill. But then again homelabbing often is about overkill.
There are probably multiple flashy clients and gui’s for it, but if you’re already used to the terminal, I’d recommend rsync. This might be the wrong syntax but something like rsync -av ~/local/project servername:/var/www/html/ would take your local files and update the web directory of your server with only the files that are more recent. Rsync will even read your ssh config file so if you’re got an entry for your server you can just use the host name.
I ran a little blog for a while using a static site generator so I setup the git server on my web server and wrote a git hook where every time I pushed to the repo the server would pull it’s cloned copy of the repo into the html directory. Took me a few hours to setup but it made updating the blog as simple as pushing to the repo.
Depends what you’re trying to do, really
If you’re talking about going in and restarting containers and checking logs, there are tools like Portainer that give a nice UI you can quickly use from your phone
If you’re talking about repetitive tasks, sometimes there’s a tool to automate it already (e.g. updates via watchtower, unattended-upgrades), and if not, you can write a script and possibly run it via a cronjob if that makes sense
If you’re talking about doing new stuff, you either stick with the SSH & shell commands, or you look into IaC tools like ansible as another reply mentioned. Another option is something like Nix where the setup is defined in config, so you make your changes there
savvywolf@pawb.social 13 minutes ago
I connect to my server using ssh and use tmux as a persistent session. Configuration wise, I use NixOS and edit the config files directly on the server via emacs.