I’ve got several servers which I work on, and quite often, this involves running regular cron’d tasks that perform various backups and configuration updates for me at odd schedules (as an example, my Rust server wipes fortnightly, and needs a config update to change the server name to reflect the last date wiped).

To do things like this, I’ve usually just written a script in PHP and run that at a given interval (daily or otherwise). There’s no real reason I chose PHP to write these scripts aside from familiarity with the language, and no doubt the rest could be easily achieved be it through Python, Shell Script or any other language out there.

For now though, PHP serves my needs just fine.

The problem is, I don’t actually keep these scripts backed up anywhere, or organised in any sort of manner!

The age of GitLab

Over the last couple days, I’ve implemented GitLab into my homelab stack (JT-LAB), and will be using it to store most of my code as a “source of truth” and subsequently sync things to GitHub afterwards (depending on the projects of course).

To the Game Servers, Four Branches…

Based off the various server types; specific branches would be used. For now, these would be:

• Rust
• Minecraft
• Factorio
• Satisfactory

Each game would be represented in its own branch, and based off that branch, would deploy a specific set of commands as needed. For the most part, only Minecraft retains itself in persistence, and the rest rely either on a voted wipe, or scheduled wipe paradigm.

To the File Systems, Five Branches…

Then we have servers with actual file resources and assets that I’d like to keep; things like Photos, Design Assets, old code references, etc. These would be:

• Media
• Design
• Research
• Education
• Maintenance

And nine, nine branches were gifted to the Websites

I also run a number of websites for friends and family on a pro-sumer level. I won’t really list these projects, but they do total up to 9! So it all kind of fits the whole LOTR theme I was going for with these titles.

One Repo to Rule them all…

The decision to build everything into one repository to manage all the core backup operations means I have less to track; for a personal system, I think this is fine. Monolithic design probably isn’t the way to go for a much larger operation than mine though!

Announcing…

Cronjobs

So this is the hypothesized project I’d like to build over the next few days; in combination primarily with jtiong.dev which will help track the commits and such that I do. Writing these projects up here as project whitepapers on a more formal basis might help with some resume stuff going forward for my future career 🙂