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Comment by chrsig | Hacker News Reader

> A new product owner came in last year and wanted to "automate everything". They wanted a web page where builds, branches, commits, and more were all on one page that showed exactly which commit was deployed where, by whom, etc etc. They wanted this extravaganza for a 2-person application that was in maintenance with no new features.

you know, this seems very reasonable until that last sentence.

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I would argue that if you are non-technical enough that you need this type of data on a web page for you, you probably don't actually need this data and I'd be wary that you're just looking for a way to find out who broke something so you can be shitty to them.

If you really want to know this type of commit-level data you can get it from git pretty easily, even if you're not particularly good with git but can search half-decently. If you don't have the skills to use git, it's extremely unlikely that knowing what the current branch and commit status of the repository is will meaningfully help you do your job.

I want this information and I can easily pull it out of git. I still want the webpage too because I don’t want to take 15 manual steps and open twenty different Github pages every time I want to find out.

Why a web page and not directly the git log? If style is necessary, reformat the log data with some fancy ASCII art?

I'm assuming the PO isn't technical so git-log, git-blame, etc. are over their head.

Which itself begs why they'd need this level of detail on the codebase.

the "which ones are deployed where" bit is nice. if you're managing a lot of repos and deployments, yeah, that kind of thing can get really messy.

i don't care how it's presented, via webpage or cli tool or whatever -- just saying that when you are working at larger scale, those are very reasonable things to want to see in one spot at a glance.

the need dissipates as you scale down.

Sure, but that's best handled by Application reporting it via monitoring system. For example, at my company, we embed git commit, version and branch that last merge to main in container environment variables. Prometheus then exposes that as labels so we can just look any time it comes up. If we wanted to build a Grafana dashboard, that could be done easily as well.

I'm sure most monitoring systems have some way to loading that into their system.

Sure, and the commenter's PO didn't specify how to get him a webpage. All very reasonable, see?

It's hard to put your current ops configuration inside the git log. If you found some way to do that that fits well in the philosophy of a stream of immutable changes, I'm interested in reading your ideas.

We are using git tags on the commit to figure out what is currently deployed where, e.g. "dev-stage", "test-stage" etc.

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