Practical automation for IT professionals
Stop repeating yourself. Learn to turn manual checks and admin tasks into small, safe, reviewable scripts and scheduled jobs.
- Who it's for
- IT professionals who do the same tasks every week and suspect a script could do them.
- Start with
- You can run commands in PowerShell or Bash. No programming background needed.
- Pace
- Self-paced. Start with one real task from your own job and automate it as you go.
The route
0 of 5 marked done
Your first useful script
Parameters, output, exit codes and failing early.
Practice: Run and read the connectivity script, then change its defaults for your environment.
- Automate the checks: a reusable connectivity scriptByteStranger lab
PowerShell for admins
Objects and the pipeline, which make PowerShell different from text-based shells.
Practice: Rewrite one manual Windows check as a PowerShell function with a parameter.
- PowerShell documentationMicrosoft Learn
Bash for servers
Text processing with grep, awk and pipes, and writing scripts that stop on errors.
Practice: Write a script that reports which systemd services have failed on a VM.
- Diagnose a failed Linux service with systemdByteStranger lab, interactive
- Bash Reference ManualGNU
Version control your scripts
Keeping scripts in Git so changes are reviewable and reversible.
Practice: Put your scripts in a Git repository and make a commit for each change.
- Pro Git bookgit-scm.com
Run it on a schedule
Scheduled tasks, cron and CI pipelines such as GitHub Actions.
Practice: Schedule your check script to run daily and keep a log of the results.
- GitHub Actions documentationGitHub Docs
By the end
- Write small scripts that are safe to run and easy to read
- Keep scripts in version control
- Schedule checks instead of remembering to run them
Where to go next
This path is a guide for independent learning. It isn't accredited and doesn't award a qualification. The external resources belong to their publishers. Progress you mark is saved only in this browser.