lucasbailey.net

Custom Tooling

One of the things I enjoy most about self hosting is the freedom to build exactly what I need without relying on bulky third-party services or sending data off to someone else’s infrastructure “for convenience.”

When existing solutions are overkill, I build my own. That’s where the custom tooling comes in.

A Lightweight CSP Endpoint (No SaaS Required)

Take Content Security Policy (CSP) violation reporting, for example.

Most developers either disable it or send reports off to some third-party service that charges for logs and limits retention. Building my own was a great project:

  • Zero dependencies
    No server-side scripting language needed. Just Nginx and some smart log formatting.
  • No third-party vendor lock-in
    Reports stay on my server. Nothing gets sent off-site, and there’s no monthly bill attached.
  • Structured JSON logs
    The endpoint accepts CSP violation reports and logs them in clean JSON format. I use custom Nginx log_format directives to extract what I need and keep everything machine, and human, readable.
I made this one, so it has dark mode…

Why Build It Myself?

Because it’s fast, private, and does exactly what I need. No dashboards I don’t use, no vendor risk, no noise. Just a small piece of tooling that does one job.

Whether it’s lightweight bash scripts for backup rotations, Git hooks for WordPress deploys, or Nginx tricks for traffic shaping, a lot of custom tooling runs under the hood to make this site lean, reliable, and fast.

But wait there’s more!

Visual Regression testing. An enterprise level upgrade, typically reserved for the most important content. Most plans start at $200/month with a limited amount of stored data.

This tool can:

  1. take a screenshot of a webpage
  2. every x minutes
  3. with a cookie consent selector, remove that pesky consent dialogue!
  4. Wait! Customizeable wait in seconds to give your page time to load, or not, your choice.
  5. Compares the previous screenshot to the newest one and generates a dif with differential content (in red).
  6. Alerts! Also has a status page that can be attached to various monitoring services like uptime Kuma or PRTG.
  7. Can pause, resume, add new, adjust, and remove VRT’s as needed.

If something on your site changes, you’ll be the first to know. Catch styling mistakes, visual bugs, and UX disasters before your customers do!