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by crazygringo 4921 days ago
Genuine question (since I'm doing the same with AWS right now) -- I wrote a script which makes an API call to Amazon to find the name of each of my instances, then SSH's into them automatically to do the equivalent of a git clone or update.

Seems to work so far -- any reason why I might want to be using a more advanced tool instead?
2 comments
gnw 4921 days ago
If it works for you for now then no real need to change it. A proper deployment tool usually makes it easier to deploy apps of different types and languages using a consistent set of tools.

What I do when working with SSH'ing to AWS instances is to give them a readable name (like nginx-1, nginx-2) tag, and then place those names as hostnames in my /etc/hosts, so I can then just run ssh nginx-1. I use a script around https://github.com/bjeanes/ghost to automate this.

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mnutt 4921 days ago
The script looks nice, though if you don't want to have to use sudo to update /etc/hosts you can also just add entries in ~/.ssh/config. Downsides are that it only works for ssh-based activities.
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latchkey 4921 days ago
Over time, you will add features to that script and it'll grow and eventually become 'a more advanced tool'. Everything starts from somewhere.
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