But Professor‽

Itch of the Week: Archiving and Restoring Digitalocean Droplets Painlessly

a.k.a. Going Full Nomad With do-automatinator

Jan 2, 2016

In the previous (first, actually) post I have promised deep stuff. It is coming, just not yet.

The motto used (Release early, release often) was popularized by Eric S. Raymond in his 1997 essay. The text also mentions other "lessons", such as "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." (- The Cathedral and the Bazaar)

The Backstory

• Digitalocean offers cheap VPS service
• You only have to pay for the hours your machines "exist", so you can go even cheaper if you are not running (permanent) services, but using the machines for development, etc.
• You don't have to pay when the machines are "destroyed"
• You can save the machines
• You can only save machines that are powered-off

The Itch

• You can't "just" shutdown, snapshot and destroy a machine with a single click of a button or a command

The Scratch

do-automatinator is a command-line tool to shut down, snapshot and destroy a machine at Digitalocean. (And to do the reverse, too)

Some Tech Stuff

Setting Your Token

coffee app.coffee settoken <your digitalocean token>

(You only have to do this once)

Shutting Down, Snapshotting and Destroying a Machine

coffee app.coffee save <machine name>

Creating a Machine from a Snapshot (aka Restoring a Machine)

coffee app.coffee restore <machine name>

The Conclusion

This way, I (and anyone using the tool) can create a machine, set it up and only pay for the hours the machine is actually in use. (As a bonus, even backups are created, for free(!))

What if I don't have a Digitalocean account yet?

If you don't have a Digitalocean account yet, using this link gets you $10 in DO credit (and some for me, too, thanks for the support).