The joy of using simple tools

I’ve been building a few toy projects. After leaving my previous job, I miss all the nice fancy DevOps systems or pipelines that I previously had, for example monitoring and CI/CD. So I looked around to see if I can find OSS alternatives. The good thing is that there are plenty out there, but the bad thing is that they are way too complicated for the kind of toy projects that I’m building. After wasting too much time on learning about these fancy offerings on the market, configuring them, and making them work together, I’ve decided that it’s not worth the effort and are overkill for simple projects. So now I just use simple CLI tools to accomplish my tasks. And I’ve beeing enjoying the simplified setup a lot!

Examples:

  1. I replaced graylog and papertrail with a rotating file log and good old `tail -f`` + fzf. Now everytime I want to check what’s going on in my server, I just do:
ssh -t server@domain 'tail -Fn+0 ~/project/simple-app/debug.log | fzf --no-sort --tac'

With just one command, I got realtime log & fuzzy filter!

  1. I replaced complicated deployment pipeline and Github Actions with this command:
ssh server@domain "cd ~/project && docker compose down && git pull && docker compose up --build -d"

For simple projects + zero customers :P, a couple of seconds of downtime makes no difference. And my quality of life improves significantly :D