golem VS Literate

This is the method I ended up using for golem (https://github.com/robsheldon/golem), a tool I wrote for executing server documentation on remotes. Shell quoting was by far the hardest part to get right, and the base64 pipe was the only solution that correctly handled all forms of quoting embedded in the scripts.

I've seen a few posts here recently on literate programming; I really hope it takes hold as a trend.

A couple of months ago I released a "literate devops" tool: https://github.com/robsheldon/golem/

It extends https://github.com/bashup/mdsh so that you can execute shell code, embedded in markdown, on remote servers. I hope someday that documented server management becomes the standard.

I use this pattern a lot along with a tool I built for doing server deployments and administration using plain old shell scripts and ssh (golem: https://github.com/robsheldon/golem/).

There are two caveats:

First, if there's any chance at all that the heredoc may contain a $, or a `, or possibly some other shell-magical characters, then you have to use a single-quoted heredoc:

  cat <<'EOF'...

What does your Literate.py implementation offer over the https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate app written in D?

That sounds like a nice way to do it, too. I heard about it before, but don't know R, so I didn't really consider it.

The reason I chose lmt is that it correctly keeps the markdown language syntax of the code blocks. That means I can put my literate config into my Zettelkasten [1] or [2] and watch it pretty-print in the browser.

There are also literate [3] and org-babel [4], but I don't think they are future proof. .lit is a random format and .org basically requires Emacs+orgmode.

1: https://github.com/srid/emanote

2: https://wiki.dendron.so/

3: https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate

4: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html