Often, I find myself in a fresh container, a VM, or even with a freshly installed Linux system on an embedded board or a server. From there, I usually want to run tasks I am used to: installing and setting up software, or running a long CLI commands.

https://cheat.sh/ is a great help in many cases, but what about my custom stuff? I wanted a simple and easy to remember place to share custom shell scripts, so I published my scripts repository as a website at sh.beuzeboc.com, powered by GitHub Pages.

Now when I launch a new machine I can curl sh.beuzeboc.com/lxd-vm and configure and launch an LXD VM without having to remember the complex CLI.

Source repository: Guillaumebeuzeboc/scripts.

Goals of this project

• Keep practical shell scripts in one place
• Make scripts always reachable without having to open anything
• Spend zero euros

Repository structure

.github/workflows
docs/
├── ...
└── ...

The .github/workflows directory contains docs-scripts-list.yml. Run on every push to keeps an updated list of the scripts on the README. This way, if I forget a script name I can simply go to the sh.beuzeboc.com to see the list.

The docs/ directory contains the scripts. In this setup, GitHub Pages publishes from docs/. I tried to symlink. It broke everything. So it stays in docs.

Hosting with GitHub Pages

Enable GitHub Pages

• Follow the instructions of GitHub Pages.

Configure custom domain

While you can keep the free GitHub Pages URL, it is not convenient to type since it is going to be something like: <username>.github.io.

So I decided to use a subdomain name:

• Set the custom domain to sh.beuzeboc.com
• Ensure the repository includes a CNAME file
• Configure DNS records (on my domain name provider) to point to this GitHub Page

Validate deployment

• Make sure to have a README.md in your docs/
• Check the latest Pages deployment status
• Open https://sh.beuzeboc.com
• Verify HTTPS is enabled

Make sure to follow exactly the steps mentioned. If anything goes wrong, GitHub may throw an HTTP 500 error, without any further information.

The scripts

For scripts, this is up to you. Try to keep them as simple as possible and rely as much as possible on POSIX tools. You never know what is installed on the host machine.

Automate the homepage

In order to have a homepage always up to date, you can automate that with a workflow.

The workflow simply lists all files, adds them to the README, and pushes the changes.

This way, there is no need to maintain the file list.