Every time I provision a new server — whether it's a $5 DigitalOcean droplet for a side project or a client's production box — there's a set of scripts I copy to /opt/scripts before I do anything else.
Not after the app is deployed. Not after the first incident. Before I touch the application at all. Before I configure nginx. Before I set up the database. The monitoring layer goes in first because the first time you need it, you needed it yesterday.
Disk monitoring that fires before the outage. A backup pipeline with automatic retention. SSL certificate checks that run daily at 8am so I'm not finding out from a user's email. A service watchdog that restarts nginx or Postgres within 60 seconds of a crash instead of six hours later when someone notices the site is down.
These scripts took me about two years of production incidents to build. Not because they're complicated — they're not. Each one is 15-50 lines. Because each one was built in response to a specific failure where I didn't have the thing I needed and had to build it under pressure at a bad time of day.
I open-sourced the basic versions on BashSnippets.xyz. Those are free and they'll stay free. But the versions I actually run in production are different from the tutorial versions in ways that matter — and that gap is what I packaged into the toolkit.
What's Different Between the Free Snippets and the Toolkit
The free snippets on the site are single-purpose scripts that each solve one problem. They're complete. They work. If all you need is a disk space check, the free version does that.
The toolkit versions are built as a system.
There's a shared library — bashlib.sh — with 31 functions that every script sources. Logging, color output, email alerts, error handling, lock file management, threshold checks, dry-run support. Instead of each script reimplementing its own log() function and its own error handling and its own email logic, they all call bashlib.sh and get consistent behavior across the board.
That means when I change how logging works, it changes everywhere. When I add Slack webhook support to the alert function, every script that calls alert() gets Slack notifications without any changes to the script itself. The shared library is the infrastructure layer that turns six standalone scripts into a cohesive system.
The free snippets don't have this because a shared library adds a dependency — bashlib.sh has to exist at a known path, the scripts have to source it at startup, and if someone downloads one script without the library it breaks. That's fine for a toolkit you install as a package. It's bad for a tutorial page where someone wants to copy-paste one script and have it work immediately. Both approaches are correct for their context.
What's in the Box
6 production scripts:
Each one follows the same structure — set -euo pipefail, sourcing bashlib.sh, named variables for every threshold and path (no magic numbers buried in command pipelines), comments explaining not just what each line does but why it exists, and explicit non-zero exits on every failure path.
The scripts cover disk space monitoring, database backup with retention, SSL certificate expiry checking across multiple domains, service watchdog with automatic restart, log rotation and cleanup, and system health reporting.
bashlib.sh — the shared library (31 functions):
This is the part I'm most particular about. Functions for timestamped logging with severity levels. Color-coded terminal output that degrades gracefully when piped to a file (no escape codes in your log files). Email and webhook alerting. Lock file acquisition with stale-lock detection. Dry-run mode that every function respects. PID file management. Threshold comparison helpers. Configuration file loading.
Every function is documented with a usage comment. Every function handles its own error cases. The library passes ShellCheck with zero warnings at every severity level.
template.sh:
A starter template that sources bashlib.sh, sets up traps, parses arguments, and has placeholder sections for your own logic. When I need a new script on a server, I copy this template, fill in the business logic, and the error handling and logging are already done.
52-page field guide (PDF):
Not an API reference. Not a man page reformatted as a PDF. A field guide — structured as the things you need to know in the order you need to know them when you're setting up automation on a new server.
Covers the why behind every pattern in the scripts. Why set -euo pipefail and what each flag actually prevents. Why traps on EXIT instead of just INT. Why lock files need stale detection. Why backup retention has to be a separate step from the backup itself. Why SSL monitoring should be independent of your renewal tool.
Each section includes the real failure scenario that motivated the pattern, because "best practice" without the consequence attached is advice that gets skipped.
Why $9
I thought about this for a while. The scripts are worth more than $9 to anyone who's going to use them — preventing one 4am incident pays for the toolkit immediately. But I also know what it's like to be the person running a $5 VPS on a budget, and I wanted the price to be low enough that buying it doesn't require approval from anyone or a second thought.
$9. MIT license. Unlimited personal and commercial use. You can deploy these on client servers, modify them however you want, include them in your own automation. No subscription. No upsell. No "starter tier" with premium features behind another paywall.
The free snippets on the site are not going away. They're not a demo. They're complete, working scripts that I actively maintain. The toolkit is for people who want the production layer — the shared library, the integrated system, the field guide that ties it together — and want it in one download instead of building it themselves.
Who This Is For
If you're managing one or more Linux servers and you don't already have automated monitoring, backups, and alerting set up — this is the fastest path to having all three. Copy the scripts to the server, edit the config variables at the top of each file, add the cron entries from the guide, and you have a monitoring layer that didn't exist 10 minutes ago.
If you already have these things set up and you built them yourself, you probably don't need this. You might find something useful in bashlib.sh — the stale lock detection or the dry-run mode — but the scripts themselves won't tell you anything new.
If you're learning bash and want to see how production scripts are structured differently from tutorial scripts, the field guide is probably the most useful part. The "why" sections explain patterns that most bash tutorials skip because they're not relevant to a single-file script running on a laptop.
Every Script Passes ShellCheck at Zero Warnings
This one matters to me. ShellCheck is the static analysis tool for bash. It catches the bugs that work on happy-path input and break on edge cases — unquoted variables that split on whitespace, pipelines that swallow exit codes, deprecated syntax that newer bash versions handle differently.
Every script in the toolkit, including bashlib.sh, passes ShellCheck at the strictest severity level with zero warnings. Not "a few style notes we decided were fine." Zero. I treat ShellCheck warnings the same way I treat compiler warnings in C — they are bugs I haven't hit yet, and ignoring them is technical debt with a guaranteed due date.
If you run ShellCheck on these files and get output, something went wrong and I want to know about it.
The Link
→ bashsnippets.xyz/starter-kit
$9. Instant download. 6 production scripts + bashlib.sh shared library (31 functions) + template.sh + 52-page field guide. ShellCheck-clean. MIT license.
Already have scripts and need somewhere to run them? DigitalOcean droplets start at $4/month and you can get $200 in free credit to start:
→ Get $200 free credit — DigitalOcean
The free snippet library with 17+ scripts and 7 interactive tools is at:
