Atuin’s New Runbook Execution Engine
113 points
4 days ago
| 7 comments
| blog.atuin.sh
| HN
theoldgreybeard
9 hours ago
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Atuin Desktop is wonderful.

At first I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it…then I realized basically anything I would want to do more than once should go in here.

One off CSV export from a custom sql query? It’s in Atuin.

Need to onboard a new dev across all our various repos and tools? Shared Atuin runbook.

Basically any kind of manual process I’ve ever needed now lives in Atuin and is almost entirely automated. It’s wonderful.

Used to do all this stuff with Confluence and a bunch of copy-paste. No more.

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ellieh
3 hours ago
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Very happy to hear you find it so useful! Please do let me know if there’s anything we can do to make it better for you
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emmelaich
1 hour ago
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I had a thing in progress to export a Confluence page to a runscript, mainly just converting `code` blocks to scripts and the rest to comments.

I, uhh, moved on before I finished it.

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piqufoh
11 hours ago
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I love atuin -- the shared shell command memory function solves a problem that I had (recalling obscure CLI commands)

I'll try atuin desktop and I hope it succeeds, but I can't say that it solves any particular problem that I have and am aware of.

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robinhood
11 hours ago
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I had the same thoughts a few months ago, and then someone told me Atuin Desktop is made for DevOps and the likes, in order to scale manual and repetitive operations accross many teams. This made sense to me.
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azuanrb
9 hours ago
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Tried it few days ago, and came to same conclusion myself. In a way, it's like Ansible but simpler for some use cases.
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nickspacek
10 hours ago
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We have CI actions we use to configure and deploy dev namespaces. We document a bunch of steps for these actions in a doc, including situational tweaks. I could see this being a great replacement for that, given the right integrations.
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gtirloni
4 hours ago
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Manual repetitive processes are already a smell. Shared across teams?
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ellieh
3 hours ago
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One of the main things we’re aiming to do here is make these manual processes much less manual! I’m a big believer in automating things gradually, which runbooks enable
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Ghoelian
11 hours ago
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I had the same feeling. It looks like a super cool product, and I'd love to do something with it. I just have no idea what.
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quasigod
7 hours ago
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Ive been wanting to give this a try. I see that it mentions markdown formatting support, but I wonder if it actually supports markdown. I'd love to find a way to integrate it with my Obsidian vault, since I already have all my shell snippets and homelab docs there
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ellieh
3 hours ago
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Not just yet! We support a bunch of features that don’t fit into markdown very well.

We will have better markdown support soon

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jdorfman
7 hours ago
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I haven’t tried the desktop but I use the CLI tool multiple times a day (sometimes hour) and I just want to thank the team for making my life easier.
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ellieh
5 minutes ago
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You’re very welcome! Glad it’s working well for you
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slurrpurr
6 hours ago
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Very cool, but what is the advantage of this over something like marimo?
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mkl
5 hours ago
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What is the advantage of a screwdriver over something like a saw?

Atuin Desktop and Marimo have quite different purposes and not much in common. Atuin Desktop is a runbook system for devops, to store, document, and run sequences of templated terminal commands (and some other things). Marimo is a reactive Python notebook development system for programming, data science, etc., which can't run terminal commands.

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zem
4 hours ago
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this looks wonderful, will have to see if I can get permission to use it at work.
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ellieh
5 minutes ago
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Let me know if there’s anything I can help with!
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imiric
10 hours ago
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Atuin seemed like an interesting way to sync shell history across machines. That wasn't a problem I personally had, but I could've seen myself giving it a try.

These recent developments with the Desktop tool, and now what seems like a Jupyter-like replacement for... shell scripts(?)... sounds completely alien to me. I'm sure it solves some problem for somebody, but it's far removed from any problem I've ever had. Good luck with the project, as it does look like a lot of work and thought went into it.

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acedTrex
9 hours ago
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Honestly atuin is great even if you dont sync history.
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thayne
2 hours ago
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What advantage does it have over zsh (or bash) native history?
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acedTrex
2 hours ago
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The fuzzy search ui bound to up is more convenient than history | grep ...
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thayne
1 hour ago
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I just hava a zsh binding for using fzf to doing a fuzzy search of my history. The fzf package actually includes the implementation of the zsh "widget".
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quasigod
7 hours ago
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Yeah even the completely offline features make it much nicer than a standard shell history
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