indidev

Honest question. I've got automated daily pg_dump backups going to S3 and I check that the files are there, but I've never actually tried restoring one on a fresh instance to see if it works.

Feel like this is one of those things where you assume it's fine until you desperately need it and find out the dumps were corrupted for 3 months.

Anyone have a setup where restores get tested automatically? Or is that overkill for side projects?

Spent an hour today renaming env vars across three services to make them "consistent." Broke staging in the process because one service cached the old values. Should've just left the mess alone — it worked fine before I touched it.

Working on a project where I need to grab screenshots of pages on a schedule — mostly for QA and keeping a visual history of what changed and when.

Right now I'm running Puppeteer in a cron job on a cheap VPS. It works, but honestly it's a pain to maintain. Chromium eats RAM like crazy, sometimes it hangs and the whole thing needs a restart, and the screenshots come out wrong on pages that load content dynamically.

A few things I've been struggling with:

• Pages with lazy-loaded images — half the time the screenshot fires before everything renders
• Cookie consent banners blocking the actual content
• Memory usage goes through the roof when I try to do more than ~50 pages in a batch

I've looked into Playwright as a replacement but from what I can tell the resource usage is about the same. Also tried running headless Chrome in Docker which at least makes cleanup easier, but didn't solve the core problems.

Curious what others are using. Are screenshot APIs worth it for this kind of thing, or is self-hosting still the way to go? Anyone running something similar at scale?

I run a few side projects and I've gone through different stages of monitoring them. First it was just checking manually if the site loads. Then I added a simple curl ping in cron. Then I started tracking response times, certificate expiry, even visual changes on pages.

At some point I realized I was spending more time building monitoring than the actual product. Classic trap.

Curious what other devs use for keeping an eye on their stuff. Do you go with a hosted service, self-host something like Uptime Kuma, or just wing it with scripts?

Hey everyone! Just signed up on Lemmy. I've been running self-hosted services for a while now and looking forward to learning from this community. Glad to be here.