Atuin’s New Runbook Execution Engine
blog.atuin.sh

・

137 points

・

emschwartz

・

7 days ago

31 comments

theoldgreybeard ・ 3 days ago

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.

  • ellieh ・ 3 days ago

    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

  • emmelaich ・ 3 days ago

    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.

piqufoh ・ 3 days ago

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.

  • robinhood ・ 3 days ago

    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.

    • nickspacek ・ 3 days ago

      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.

    • azuanrb ・ 3 days ago

      Tried it few days ago, and came to same conclusion myself. In a way, it's like Ansible but simpler for some use cases.

    • gtirloni ・ 3 days ago

      Manual repetitive processes are already a smell. Shared across teams?

      • ellieh ・ 3 days ago

        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

  • Ghoelian ・ 3 days ago

    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.

imiric ・ 3 days ago

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.

  • acedTrex ・ 3 days ago

    Honestly atuin is great even if you dont sync history.

    • quasigod ・ 3 days ago

      Yeah even the completely offline features make it much nicer than a standard shell history

    • thayne ・ 3 days ago

      What advantage does it have over zsh (or bash) native history?

      • acedTrex ・ 3 days ago
        ・ 4 more

        The fuzzy search ui bound to up is more convenient than history | grep ...

        • thayne ・ 3 days ago
          ・ 3 more

          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".

          • acedTrex ・ a day ago
            ・ 2 more

            That's probably essentially the same thing, atuin being sqlite based is possibly faster but its not likely to matter until you reach a very very large history.

            • ellieh ・ 21 hours ago

              The main difference otherwise is that Atuin stores much more data + syncs it

              We shelled out to fzf in the very early days, but found the initial indexing to be a bit slower + add latency vs SQLite

quasigod ・ 3 days ago

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

  • ellieh ・ 3 days ago

    Not just yet! We support a bunch of features that don’t fit into markdown very well.

    We will have better markdown support soon

jdorfman ・ 3 days ago

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.

  • ellieh ・ 3 days ago

    You’re very welcome! Glad it’s working well for you

Ferret7446 ・ 3 days ago

Unfortunately I've uninstalled atuin while this bug is getting fixed

https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin/issues/2969

The slow turnaround is somewhat disappointing but not surprising for a FOSS project; I'd fork it but using a forked Rust project is quite inconvenient vs, e.g. Python where you can just clone it and go.

eternityforest ・ 2 days ago

Having trouble getting it to work on Ubuntu, the terminals seem to work but do not show any output. Definitely looking forward to when all the issues are ironed out, I'll probably make it a core part of some of my projects.

The CLI is amazing though!

shellfishgene ・ 2 days ago

Do I need to make an account for this if I don't actually want to share anything?

slurrpurr ・ 3 days ago

Very cool, but what is the advantage of this over something like marimo?

  • mkl ・ 3 days ago

    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.

pavlov ・ 2 days ago

Cute typo:

”if you run a command like mktemp -d to create a tempflorary directory”

A tempflorary sounds like a pop-up garden.

zem ・ 3 days ago

this looks wonderful, will have to see if I can get permission to use it at work.

  • ellieh ・ 3 days ago

    Let me know if there’s anything I can help with!

    • zem ・ 3 days ago

      great, will do! this really does look like the solution to having random docs and shell scripts scattered around