
Show HN: Snibox – Self-hosted snippets manager - mickey_spb
https://github.com/snibox/snibox
======
vasilakisfil
Looks good! Unfortunately the problem with the self-hosted apps is lack of
maintenance, so after a couple of years, when the author doesn't push any
updates to it you will be forced to move on to an alternative. And at that
point you will lose all your data (in this case, gists) and links, let alone
time.

~~~
JD557
I would argue that the opposite is true:

> Unfortunately the problem with the SaaS is lack of control, so after a
> couple of years, when the company shuts down you will be forced to move on
> to an alternative. And at that point you will lose all your data (in this
> case, gists) and links, let alone time.

Even if the author stops posting updates, you can keep using the application
for as long as you like. Since it's open source, you can even update it
yourself if you really need it.

Also, all your data is stored on a database that you control, so you'll never
lose them (unless you delete the database). In this case, gists might even be
stored as a git repository, so it might not be that hard to import them to
another self-hosted snippets app.

~~~
scrollaway
> _Also, all your data is stored on a database that you control, so you 'll
> never lose them (unless you delete the database)._

The opposite is true as well:

> _Also, all your data is stored on a database that you control, so you 'll
> eventually lose them (unless you apply the same rigor in system
> administration, backups and security that large companies would)._

I used to always host everything myself. I knew the risks, and I knew they
would bite me some day, but I wanted to learn. I don't regret this choice.

But the day I lost my 10 years of IRC chat history was the day I subscribed to
IRCCloud instead.

The day I lost all the photos I took with my mom on some trip was the day I
started heavily using Google Photos.

Even long before that, the day I lost my only physical copy of my favourite
game was the day I bought it back on GOG.

Life's too short to care about this stuff for more than the learning
experience. Using cloud services is a fucking _immense_ productivity gain. Of
course I still encourage people to run their own stuff, and I 100% back self-
hosted alternatives (they're _important_ ).

The best services in my experience provide self-hosted + paid hosted service.
Those are the ones you can really trust. You choose your trade-off based on
your use case, and you are very likely to get the advantage of data
portability. Paying money for it also ensures you're less likely to get
screwed by their whims.

~~~
QasimK
It just sounds like all of the self-hosted services you were using were crap
to be honest. They still are more or less.

IRC and photos should have a one-click button to set up encrypted backups to a
location of your choosing, local, remote, cloud. Ideally, of course, you’d
configure this location once and then all apps would automatically use it.

As for physical games, this is not a comparable example (physical self-managed
vs virtual self-managed). In this case, you’d virtually back up the disk, and
if you can’t because of DRM or something, then you don’t really own it.

Your comment on self-hosted + paid-hosted I especially agree with and is one
that I’ve quite recently also came to the conclusion of.

~~~
scrollaway
> _It just sounds like all of the self-hosted services you were using were
> crap to be honest._

No... they just match up with expectations of what I said: You need backup
solutions. Those backup solutions need to work, need to be recoverable. And
when a disaster happens, let's say there's a fire at my house, the last thing
I want to be doing is spending hours recovering backup. That's a sysadmin's
job, not mine.

I don't know why you say IRC "should have a one-click button to set up
encrypted backups to a location of your choosing" \-- that's not the case of
any existing service to my knowledge, possibly not even for photos. And I also
wouldn't expect every single self-hosted service developer out there to have
to set up something like that, especially given that the development of such a
thing requires pretty extensive sysadmin knowledge and self-hosted projects
tend to be open-source-volunteer ones.

I'd love to have more things work like git though. Easy mirroring.
Decentralized truth. In some way, IPFS, but not for like the entire internet;
just for select projects.

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lwerdna
Really well done, I like the tags and organization.

Here's a low-tech alternative for .bashrc:

    
    
        snipc() {
        	local fpath=$HOME/workspace/snippets.c
        	if [ "$1" == "vim" ]; then
        		gvim $fpath
        	else
        		less $fpath
        	fi
        }
    

Replace vim with your favorite editor. I also have functions for python
(snippy), Make (snipmake), etc.

~~~
jamietanna
Try using `$EDITOR` instead of an argument as that's a more standard env
variable to specify preferred editor!

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jookyboi
Nice work. Happy to see a competitor in the space.

For a fully-managed option with desktop clients and integrations with VSCode,
Atom and Sublime, check out Cacher:
[https://www.cacher.io](https://www.cacher.io)

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vorpalhex
Great to see stuff like this built but having an app this simple require a
full RoR backend seems overkill - either I'm stuck running it in Docker (which
isn't too bad) or manually getting the right Ruby environment up (horrifying).

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Odenwaelder
I really like this and have been looking for something like Snibox for quite
some time. Thanks for sharing!

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mickey_spb
correct link to the repository:
[https://github.com/snibox/snibox](https://github.com/snibox/snibox)

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pavanear
Looking good !

