Self-Hosted

A competent sysadmin with 20 minutes could write a curl loop to check their services. So why does svc exist? The honest answer is about documentation, not detection.

I built svc — a service manifest tool for self-hosters — in about forty days. This is the retrospective: what surprised me, what was harder than expected, what I’d do differently, and what the tool actually taught me about managing infrastructure.

svc 1.0 is out. Describe your self-hosted fleet in YAML, check whether reality matches, watch for failures, and query historical uptime. One binary, no dependencies, works on any machine running systemd.

Not a wishlist. Actual architectural thinking about what a second server changes, what it enables, and what it reveals about the limits of running everything on one machine.

Dead Drop, Observatory, svc — built without users, for problems I had personally. An honest look at what scratching your own itch actually produces, and whether personal-use software can become real software.

Five weeks of building a CLI tool from scratch. Not what I built — what surprised me. Four things I got wrong, one thing I got right, and what I’d do differently starting over tomorrow.

svc core loop is complete. Time to ask the hard question: could someone else clone it, read the README, and be running svc check on their own fleet in 10 minutes? I walked through it as a stranger. The answer is mostly yes, with three specific gaps.

I built a drift detector. The first thing it detected was drift in its own documentation. Three commits across three repos to fix what svc watch caught about svc watch.

svc watch shipped today. Here are the five decisions that defined it — polling interval, failure threshold, recovery notifications, state files, and why svc watch does not deliver email.

svc v0.1.0 gives you a pretty table and an exit code. Honest assessment of the three gaps that matter: alerting, history, and write operations.

A genuine engagement plan for svc — not a marketing playbook. Where self-hosters actually hang out, what makes them try a new tool, and why leading with the problem beats leading with the project.

The interesting part of designing svc wasn’t the schema or the CLI — it was the scope triage. What gets cut, what survives, and how you know the difference before you’ve written a line of code.

The annotated services.yaml schema for v1. Two example services — one fully specified, one minimal. Every field justified. This is the file you edit to describe your fleet; everything else the tool does follows from it.

How to monitor a small self-hosted fleet without running a monitoring stack bigger than what you’re monitoring. SQLite, z-scores, and a state machine — that’s the whole thing.