What is The Runbook?
The Runbook is a collection of practical, open-access technical guides for people who run and build systems - sysadmins and developers. It’s published online at runbook.fyi and it’s free to read.
What’s covered
The Runbook spans a range of hands-on topics, including:
- Linux essentials - from the shell up through scripting practices.
- DNS administration - fundamentals through architecture and operations.
- Git - version-control basics through internals and scaling.
- Databases - relational fundamentals through NoSQL and operations.
- Nginx, TLS/SSL and PKI, and Docker - focused guides on web serving, certificates, and containers.
- Python and Perl - developer introductions and roadmaps.
Some topics are deep; others are intentionally short. Coverage is uneven by design - it grows as guides are written.
Using it
The Runbook is a documentation site, best read online. It has full-text search, light and dark themes, copy buttons on code blocks, and some guides include interactive elements like quizzes and command builders. You can also run it locally from the source repository if you’d like an offline copy.
An honest caveat
This is practitioner-written reference material, not authoritative or warranty-backed documentation. Some guides may be outdated - especially for fast-moving or security-sensitive tasks, verify against the official upstream docs before relying on them in production.
Where to go next
- Contributing to and reusing The Runbook covers corrections, contributions, and licensing.
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