Like soup-to-nuts. I know I need to document what I’m doing and I’ve started several times, but then I never go back and make updates. I don’t know if it’s just the ADHD or if I’m just going about it or thinking about it in the wrong way.

So I’m curious about:

  • what you use for your documentation
  • how you organize it
  • what information you include
  • how you work documentation into your changes/tinkering flow

Edit: Dang, folks! You all have given me a lot to read through, think about, and explore. Thank you!

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    321·
    9 hours ago

    The fun thing about infrastructure as code is that the terraform, ansible and k8s manifests are documentation.

    I only really need to document some bootstrap things in case of emergency and maybe some “architectural” things. I use joplin for that (and many other things).

    • AliasVortex@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      That’s the direction I’m moving my lab in. Plus a bit of supplemental markdown to keep track of which guides I’m referencing (and which parts can be ignored because I baked it into the terrafom). It’s really nice to know that as long as I tweak the terraform for changes, I don’t have to worry about forgetting what I changed.

    • BruisedMoose@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      Without really knowing much about it, I just always figured it was overkill for me. Plus I don’t know that I’d even consider myself much more of a beginner with Docker. But you all are making me consider looking into it.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        11·
        7 hours ago

        I get that - it’s difficult to see the point in it until you’ve gone along without it. Especially as a beginner since you don’t have a strong sense of what problems you will encounter and how these tools solve those problems.

        At some point the learning curve for IaaC becomes worth the investment. I actually pushed off learning k8s myself for some time because it was “too complicated” and docker-compose worked just fine for me. And now that I’ve spent time learning it I converted over very quickly and wouldn’t go back… It’s much easier to maintain, monitor and setup new services now.

        Depending on your environment something like Ansible might be a good place to start. You can begin even with just a simple playbook that does an “apt update && apt upgrade” on all your systems. And then start using it to push out standard configurations, install software, create users, etc. The benefit pays off in time. For example - recently (yesterday) I was able to install Apache Alloy on a half-dozen systems trivially because I have a set of Ansible scripts that manage my systems. Literally took 10 mins. All servers have the app installed, running, and using the same configuration. And I can modify that configuration across all those systems just as easily. It’s very powerful and reduces “drift” where some systems are configured incorrectly and over time you forget “which one the correct one?” For me the “correct one” is the one in source control.