Thoughts, tutorials, and insights from the trenches.
Let's Encrypt's 90-day certificates are designed to force automation. But I constantly find servers where the renewal cron job runs, but nobody told the web server to reload the new certificate.
systemd timers are more capable, but I still write cron jobs. Here is how I actually decide between the two.
Doing server hardening by hand works fine until you're doing it for the tenth time that month. Here's the Ansible playbook that automates my baseline checklist.
Most small projects do not need an elaborate pipeline. They need a basic `.gitlab-ci.yml` that builds, tests, and deploys reliably. Here is the one I start from.
A handful of small scripts go on every server I manage before any application gets deployed. None of them are clever, and that is exactly why they are still useful years later.