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Ask HN: Which proprietary SaaS can be replaced with FOSS cron jobs?

13 points by mathnmusic ↗ HN
I am thinking of using `curl` for healthcheck, `lighthouse` for webpage performance analysis, `ab` for load-testing etc.

Which other open-source tools are useful to run as cron jobs?

6 comments

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ezekg
The classic dropbox -> rsync, of course.
dcolkitt
Not a cron job per se... But people overlook Redmine as a fantastic alternative to project management systems like Asana or bug trackers like Jira.
superasn
I think a lot of popular services are just enhancements to open source tools like git, selenium, elasticsearch, etc.

But to answer your question selenium/puppeteer looks like a good tool for automatic website monitoring and testing.

tnolet
Running Puppeteer for monitoring is 50% of the SaaS I run. You can totally run it in a cronjob. Getting it to behave predictably and consistently and delivering actionable results is a different thing though.
superasn
Yes I think browserless.io is a very good site if you want to avoid those headaches with puppeteer.

But it may dilute your profits though since you'll need to buy a commercial license for it even though the project itself is open source. Depends on the money vs time you want to invest in doing it.