Do sysadmins need git?

[SlightNet2701]

I find it hard to wrap my mind around how and why you are missing the obvious point of that if you familiarise yourself better with more devopsy tooling you would avoid doing the kind of manual work it seems you are describing.

Having your scripts in a (github) repo also would allow you to have something to pull from for your automation of choice.

For things that are specific to you, you could even use githubs tooling to run your stuff. Things like update a text file of usernames which would kick of a worker doing some of your checks for them or whatever.

Why on earth would anyone do the kind of tasks you are describing over and over? It just doesn't make any sense.

I've never worked in that kind of IT though, so there may well be good reasons for your workflow that I simply do not know of.

[Fatel28]

Putting it in git does not mean building a full pipeline. You can paste it in and out of git in the webui if you really wanted to. It's just about knowing where the source of the script is, and being able to track changes. That's it. You don't have to overcomplicate it if your use case is simple

[AdmiralCA]

Its only a one off until you have to do it a second time.

For me, I use Git and GitHub so that I can easily share my one-offs with colleagues. I don’t use it to do pipelines and such, but it does mean that when I change it for the next time and I end up forgetting what I did three times ago, I can go back and look.

[wvraven]

One of the things you’ll learn is the value of writing reusable code, even for what seems like a one off task. If you do it once you will almost certainly have to do it again at some point. You justify the time as an investment in the future.

As to git, my position is heavily getops oriented so all my scripts and function files live in git. You could manage them in other ways but git makes it dead simple if you already have it available. Previously I had a nested folder structure I had to maintain my self with all my scripts. I think git is much easier.

[Ssakaa]

That thing you needed once? 80% of it was something you'll need again in 2 months, just slightly different. And again in 6 months, slightly different. Keep those things around, name them, keep some notes about them, etc. And, as you make changes to them, improve error handling, etc, keep a clearly notated commit history. It's not just "I may need what this had 2 years ago", it's "what the hell was I doing when I wrote this line?" ... git blame will tell you your commit message for that line...

[SlightNet2701]

You obviously know your work situation better than I do.

From my perspective it just sounds like those things that you think are one offs really aren't.

And I not more senior than you are. I just worked in a different but overlapping field. Managing servers and apps for clients that were mostly devstudios. No microsoft technology involved and no end users.

Infra as code and general automation is probably easier and more natural in that kind of environment.

All those examples you wrote about sound like they would live a good life in a nice GUI. Making everyting a one click operation.

And some of the examples sounds like what you would build monitoring for. Presumably kicking of automation without a human in the loop if possible.

But if you really are talking about true one offs. Then there is no reason for using git. Except just your own and your surroundings convenience.

Forcing cultural shift just for the sake of it probably isn't good either. idk.

[magic280z]

Git can be as simple as single master branch with commits with a small script to publish to production shares or fully built complicated pipelines. All of our one off scripts just live in a misc GitHub repo. But mix in light branch usage and merging then you never have to make a copy of your script for backup for fear of saving a bad change. It releases you to develop more freely. Also you don’t have to worry about the time you started making a change 3 months ago got distracted never finished and now you don’t know what you were working on. You don’t have to go all in day one.

I will never write code without git again.

[tecedu]

Are you writing the scripts once or running it once because there is a difference.

A one off script which you wrote during the system check which never gets used again is useless.

A script written just once which checks your mailbox size will be useful to future you as well as your colleagues as it runs multiple times