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Comment by takinola | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, I have a very different experience than you. I simply have a script that sets up the server. I keep updating the script to make it better each time I hit an edge case. At this point, it's pretty bullet-proof. Updates are automatic and so I can leave the server running for months without any intervention.

Due to my love to shiny things, I keep wanting to find an excuse to move to a PaaS but I can never find a sufficient justification.

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My issue was that the ubuntu version my VPS was on went out of LTS so I had to do a full major OS upgrade which I kept keeping off…

LTS support lasts for 5 years so this works out to be a problem that happens twice a decade so I'm willing to put up with it.

How do you make your updates automatic?

Honestly, I can't remember exactly. I believe there are some settings in Ubuntu that apply updates automatically. I set just the security updates to reduce the risk of breaking something. The beauty of the system is that I can forget stuff like this and still get the benefit of my previous knowledge.

Is it a normal shell script or do you use something else?

It's basically a combination of documentation (Step 1: Do this, Step 2 Do that) and shell scripts wherever possible. I can just follow the steps and run the commands without thinking and go from a bare server to a fully deployed working app in about 20 minutes.

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