SSH Snippets & Scheduled Commands

Save reusable shell commands as Tempest Snippets and run them on a schedule across one or many SSH hosts, with cross-device notifications on failure.

Snippets are Tempest's saved shell commands — paste a command once, give it a name, and re-run it on any host with a click. Scheduled runs turn snippets into cron jobs that fire on the hosts you choose, with notifications routed to your phone via Tempest Push when a run fails.

It's the missing layer between "I keep retyping the same journalctl -u …" and "I don't want to set up Ansible just for three commands."

Save a snippet

Open the Snippets panel.
Click New Snippet.
Paste your command (multi-line is fine — bash heredocs, pipelines, etc.).
Give it a name and optionally a description.
Save.

Snippets sync across your devices via your encrypted vault, just like hosts.

Run a snippet

In any SSH tab, open the snippet panel and pick one — Tempest sends it through the channel
Or target multiple hosts at once: pick the snippet, select hosts from your list, run. Each host gets its own output panel.

Schedule a snippet

Open a snippet → Schedule tab.
Set the cron expression (UI helper for common patterns: every hour, every day at 3 AM, etc.).
Pick targets: one host, a tag-matched group, or all hosts.
Optional: enable Notify on failure → exit code ≠ 0 triggers a Tempest Push to your phone.
Save.

The schedule runs in the Tempest backend (Electron main process / standalone server), not in the renderer. So:

Your laptop can be asleep and the run still happens — as long as the Tempest backend is up.
On the standalone Tempest server, schedules survive even if no client is connected (perfect for lightweight ops automation).

Run history

Each scheduled run records:

Start / end timestamp
Exit code
Stdout / stderr captured (configurable size limit)
Per-target status when running fan-out

Browse history in Snippets → History with filters by snippet, host, and status.

When to use snippets vs. an actual config-management tool

Use Snippets when

Use Ansible / Puppet / Salt when

1–10 hosts

Hundreds of hosts

Operational commands ("show me the disk usage", "restart this service")

Declarative state ("nginx must be installed")

You want one-shot fan-out from your laptop

You want a CI pipeline triggering converged state

Quick fix for a specific incident

Reproducible infrastructure

The two complement each other — snippets handle ad-hoc operational tasks, real config-management tools handle long-lived state.

Pro feature

Scheduled runs are part of Tempest Pro. Saving and one-off running of snippets is free.