Ask HN: Have you built internal CLI tools for your team? Has it payed off? - mlejva
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rudasn
Good question!

I manage a few on premise servers, running docker containers, with ansible. I
have some app version-specifc playbooks that I run when necessary (eg. a
version that requires changes on the server) and a playbook.sh script to run
such playbooks (that provides some default values, logging etc).

I've been thinking about adding a cli that would make it easier to prompt the
user for values, and execute certain work flows depending on the values. I'm
not sure if it's worth the effort though, and wonder if it's something that's
easier done with ansible.

I wonder what other people have done in similar situations.

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mlejva
We are a small team and we built ourselves a not so complicated CLI tool to
ease inspecting and management of our infrastructure. It certainly boosted our
productivity and made our lives much easier. I'm not sure whether the time
spent developing this tool was worth it though. Since it's not just one time
job but a continuous maintenance. On the other, we wouldn't go back to the old
ways now.

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giantg2
I've done this for two of my previous teams. One team was appreciative and it
saved us some time for elevation prep work.

I built something else that was also for elevation prep work for my second
team. It saved some time and boredom by automating some reports running for
15-20 projects. They didn't care. That group was very concerned with status,
conformity, and prestige as far as how you got rated. So for people like me,
nothing was ever good enough.

