Scotty: A beautiful SSH task runner

They don't mention a twinkle that many task runners seem keen to omit: how do you handle things where there are human steps involved and not everything is automated? How do you track what has worked and what is still left to do if things go sidesways?

I built baker (https://github.com/coezbek/baker) for this some time ago (pre-LLM mostly). It uses markdown with embedded bash and ruby commands to give you a checklist which is run both automated for commands or with human in the loop for things which aren't automated (like login to some admin panel and generate that key, copy it here).

The checklist gets checked off both by human actions (you confirm that you did it) and automated e.g. success bash command runs. So you keep a markdown artifact on where you are in your project and can continue later.

You can wrap commands to run via SSH (of course clunkier than what scotty here does, but you can select a port for SSH).

> It lets you define deploy scripts and other remote tasks

Ok.

> run them from your terminal and watch every step as it happens

> and watch every step as it happens

Yes, this is usually how scripts work.

> When everything finishes, you get a summary table with timing for each step.

> If a task fails, its output is shown and execution stops right there so you can investigate.

Yes, I write my larger scripts to do such things...

> Writing plain bash instead of Blade

Yes, probably a good idea.

Call me crazy (you're crazy!) but I'm not seeing the point.

I made something similar years ago, a long one-liner.

  tar cpf - provision/ | ssh [email protected] "tar xpf - -C /tmp && cd /tmp/provision && bash /tmp/provision/bootstrap.sh && rm -rf /tmp/provision"

I named "Ansible for the Frugal"

The most obvious question, I know, but... why not just use plain Bash?

Feels like Ansible does the same thing, just with nicer output

The naming is perfect — Scotty from Star Trek was always the guy making impossible things happen on impossible timelines. SSH task runners have always felt like they should be simpler than they are, curious how this compares to Fabric or Ansible for lightweight use cases.

alias bones='scotty doctor'