Watchdog Panel

Watchdog is a DevOps lifecycle tool with a focus on Subversion to suit my typical production needs.

The Watchdog Panel is a simple web interface, which gives teams a visual interface to manage their project repositories. It offers a fully configurable roles-based permission system, repository & project management as well as a user define-able release management and simple documentation features. In addition, it gives your team useful insights into projects or user statistics which are visually presented to you within the dashboard.

Although subversion is not quite the go-to repository tool of choice nowadays anymore I do still prefer it for certain project types. However, its lack of a standard web interface makes it sometimes hard to use for team members who struggle with CLI & server work. Furthermore, I started to miss a couple of DevOps features I got used to by other platforms. That is why I started a few years ago to work on the Watchdog Panel.

First, it was just a simple web interface to make repository & user administration easier for my fellow teammates at work, but it quickly evolved into a more capable platform to automate repetitive tasks & overwatch deployment states and servers.

It allows the easy creation of new projects with their related repositories, either fully from scratch or via a templating system. All through a visually appealing dashboard, with adjustable user permissions, to control which team member can perform specific tasks. In addition, it can be used to run automated releases or application builds through the interface, while also keeping track of any occurring deployment issues or server downtimes. About which it sends notifications if required.

While the easy-to-use web interface does certainly lower the usage entry barriers, compared to a fully CLI approach, for newer team members. I personally really appreciate the visual statistics which offer me valuable insights into the projects I am working on. Tough for that it certainly helps that the panel is written by myself, as it gives me the control & knowledge to add the pieces, I feel missing.

I am personally using the panel for a couple of years now running on a small tinker board, while it's also being used for production work within some companies I work with. Nether less I do still consider this a rather personal project as it's specifically hand-tailored towards the use-cases within those teams and not necessarily optimized for a broad usage yet (though it's modular enough to run git instead of SVN on a per-project basis if that’s your cup of tea 😉).

However, besides helping me with many of my daunting days to day tasks, its creation and maintenance taught me a lot about Dev-Ops and the setup of CI/CD Pipelines over the years and still does. Which is something I would have never learned if I would have only stuck to some of the off-shelf solutions.