I’m working as a system administrator and recently started exploring GitHub for automation tools and scripts. I’m looking for recommendations from experienced admins who have been using GitHub repositories for their daily tasks.
I’m particularly interested in tools that can help with system maintenance, software deployment, and general administrative workflows. If you have any favorite repositories or custom scripts that have made your job easier, I’d love to hear about them.
I’ve already discovered a few useful tools like system imaging solutions, package managers, Windows maintenance utilities, and debloating scripts. These have been really helpful for streamlining repetitive tasks.
What GitHub repositories or automation scripts do you use regularly in your sysadmin work? Any hidden gems that aren’t widely known but are incredibly useful?
i’ve been pulling chef cookbooks from the community repo even tho we don’t run chef everywhere. there’s tons of good shell scripts and config templates you can strip out. also check the grafana dashboards repo - loads of premade monitoring configs that work with prometheus and influxdb. the docker-compose examples repo has been super handy for quick service deployments too.
Ansible’s community collections on GitHub have saved me tons of time. Even without full Ansible deployments, their individual playbooks and modules are packed with automation ideas. I’ve pulled several config management scripts and adapted them for standalone use. PowerShell DSC configurations are another hidden gem - everyone knows Microsoft’s DSC resource kit, but the community contributions are where the real gold is. Found some excellent server hardening and baseline config scripts that I’ve tweaked for our setup. For monitoring, I’ve discovered some killer Python scripts that hook into APIs for automated ticket creation and health checks. Best part about GitHub? You can fork these projects and customize them instead of building everything from zero.
Infrastructure as code repos have been game-changers for me. The hashicorp/terraform-aws-modules repo is solid - their modules for security groups, VPCs, and EC2 deployments blow away anything I wrote from scratch early on. I’ve also grabbed some bash and Python scripts for automated log rotation and analysis that saved me from several storage nightmares. There’s this underrated collection of systemd service templates and monitoring scripts that’s been clutch for managing custom apps and auto-restarting failed services. Just make sure you pick repos with active maintainers and decent docs, then tweak them for your setup instead of using them straight out of the box.