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Literate Devops with Emacs

Howard Abrams · demo · Watch on YouTube

Testing, debugging & developer toolsCloud, DevOps & reliability

What it is

Howard Abrams demonstrates, in an EmacsConf 2015 talk, how he uses org-mode's Babel and Tramp to configure and operate remote servers from a single document. Code blocks, their results and the explanatory text all live together.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN people point to it as the best demonstration of literate devops, showing documentation and execution woven together in Emacs.

  • 8 people recommended it
  • 9 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2015, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “His video on literate programming for DevOps via Emacs' Org-mode was very impressive and inspiring to me. It's my favorite.”

    Impressive, inspiring literate devops via org-mode.

    pxc, 2023-08 · Strong recommendation · in “Emacs is my new window manager”

  2. “Howard Abrams literate devops is an interesting example of what org-mode code blocks can do.”

    Example of what org-mode code blocks can do for literate devops.

    brudgers, 2015-09 · Recommendation · in “Emacs Artist Mode”

  3. “Check out this literate devops video”

    Literate devops using org-babel.

    julienchastang, 2015-11 · Recommendation · in “Worg, the Org-Mode Community”

  4. “Howard Abrams has extended the concept to create literate devops”

    Code in documents configures local or remote servers via Babel.

    deerpig, 2017-11 · Recommendation · in “What Is a Computational Essay?”

  5. “is a pretty neat demo of combining org-babel and tramp”

    Neat demo combining org-babel and tramp.

    unhammer, 2018-05 · Recommendation · in “ZSH, tmux, Emacs and SSH: A copy-paste story”

  6. “The stuff that Howard Abrahams discusses on the below video is something I think would be highly successful in a remote environment.”

    Documenting workflow with commands and output for remote teams.

    ScarZy, 2018-06 · Recommendation · in “Remote Only”

  7. “In this video [0] by Howard Abrahams you can see how to wave the instructions and the execution of them with Emacs.”

    Shows weaving instructions and their execution together in Emacs.

    elviejo, 2020-07 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: What do you use to write documentation? LaTeX? Word? Markdown?”

  8. “Try seeing this”

    Shows Emacs power in action.

    kkfx, 2022-04 · Recommendation · in “A Dotfile History”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: emacs, org-mode, org-babel, tramp, devops, literate programming

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