10 Bash Scripts That Gave Me My Weekends Back
I'm not going to sell you on Kubernetes for a 5-person team. Here's what actually moved the needle: ~10 small scripts running on cron that killed my most repeated tasks.
The Scripts (With What They Replace)
- backup-and-prune.sh — nightly tarball + 30-day prune → replaced "did anyone back up the server?"
- disk-watchdog.sh — alerts at 80% disk → replaced the Saturday-morning full-disk outage
- ssl-expiry-check.sh — 14-day warning on every cert → replaced the client emailing "your site is broken"
- log-rotate-and-ship.sh — rotates, compresses, ships to cold storage → replaced manual SSH cleanup
- healthcheck-sweep.sh — curls every endpoint, posts failures to Slack → replaced "is the API down?"
- db-snapshot.sh — logical dump + checksum verification → replaced hope
- user-audit.sh — lists active accounts + last login → replaced "who still has access?"
- deploy-and-tag.sh — one command deploy with git tag + changelog entry → replaced 12-step wikis
- uptime-daily-report.sh — 6 AM summary email of all systems → replaced checking 6 dashboards
- restore-drill.sh — restores last backup to a scratch dir monthly → the one that catches everything
The 80/20 That Nobody Does
Notice #10. A backup you've never restored is a vibe, not a backup. One script, once a month, and you'll find every silent failure — corrupt dumps, full storage, broken credentials — before the real emergency does.
Steal the Whole Set
I packaged all of these (plus the watchdog patterns, cron schedules, and alerting hooks) with comments explaining every line — written for people who maintain systems part-time, not full-time SREs.
👉 Automation Starter Pack — deploy in an afternoon.
Start With Three
Don't do ten. Do backup-and-prune, disk-watchdog, and ssl-expiry-check this week. Those three prevent ~80% of the "surprise" incidents I've seen on small teams.
Your weekend is a script away.
Top comments (0)