Dropship Helper

System operations and monitoring tool for checking health, viewing logs, managing backups, setting alerts, and optimizing performance. A lightweight CLI for sysadmins who want quick system insights without heavy monitoring stacks.

Commands

Command	Description
`dropship-helper status`	Show system uptime and current status
`dropship-helper check`	Run a health check (CPU cores, memory usage)
`dropship-helper monitor <target>`	Start monitoring a specified service or resource
`dropship-helper logs`	View the 5 most recent syslog entries
`dropship-helper config`	Show the configuration directory path
`dropship-helper restart <service>`	Print the systemctl restart command for a service
`dropship-helper backup <path>`	Generate a tar backup command for the given path
`dropship-helper alert <metric> <threshold>`	Set an alert with a metric name and threshold value
`dropship-helper optimize`	Display optimization tips (clear cache, compress logs, kill zombies)
`dropship-helper info`	Show full system info (uname, disk usage)
`dropship-helper help`	Show all available commands
`dropship-helper version`	Show current version

Data Storage

All data is stored in ~/.local/share/dropship-helper/ (override with $DROPSHIP_HELPER_DIR or $XDG_DATA_HOME):

Data log — data.log (main data store)
Activity history — history.log (unified timeline of all command invocations with timestamps)

History format: MM-DD HH:MM <command>: <value>, one line per action.

Requirements

Bash 4+ with set -euo pipefail
Standard POSIX/Linux utilities (uptime, free, df, uname, grep, tail, date, tar)
Access to /proc/cpuinfo and /var/log/syslog for check and logs commands (graceful fallback if unavailable)
No external dependencies or API keys required

When to Use

Quick server health checks — run check and status to get CPU, memory, and uptime at a glance without installing a monitoring agent
Incident triage — use logs and info to quickly gather system context during an outage or alert
Backup scripting — generate tar backup commands with backup and integrate into cron jobs or CI pipelines
Service restart guidance — use restart <service> to get the exact systemctl command instead of guessing service names
Performance optimization — run optimize for actionable tips on clearing caches, compressing logs, and killing zombie processes

Examples

# Check system uptime
dropship-helper status

# Run a health check (CPU cores + memory)
dropship-helper check

# View recent syslog entries
dropship-helper logs

# Get full system info including disk usage
dropship-helper info

# Generate a backup command for /etc
dropship-helper backup /etc

# Set an alert for CPU usage
dropship-helper alert cpu 90

# Get the restart command for nginx
dropship-helper restart nginx

# Show optimization tips
dropship-helper optimize

# Check configuration directory
dropship-helper config

# Start monitoring a service
dropship-helper monitor redis

Output

All command output goes to stdout. Redirect to a file if needed:

dropship-helper check > health-report.txt
dropship-helper info > system-info.txt

The check command reads from /proc/cpuinfo and free -h; the logs command reads the last 5 lines of /var/log/syslog. Both degrade gracefully if access is denied.