Death Plan Switch is a self-hosted dead man's switch for solo devs: Reveneau

Why it mattersEvery one-person studio sits on client sites, domains and hosting that nobody else knows about, and this is the first self-hosted tool that notices the quiet and tells the right people in the right order.

The one-person web studio has a problem that only shows up once. The owner knows where every client site, domain and hosting account lives, and nobody else does. Death Plan Switch, a Show HN launch that reached 78 points and 57 comments on Hacker News, is a small self-hosted PHP app that notices when the owner stops answering and tells the right people, in the right order, without frightening the family on a long weekend.

The project is MIT-licensed and was built by the owner of a one-person web studio in regional New South Wales. The author says they wrote it because nothing simple enough to self-host already existed.

How the sequence runs

Every step is counted from a weekly check-in email, and the spacing on the site's own timeline is to scale. Hour 0 is the check-in: the owner presses a button on a page the project serves. Hour 24 and hour 48 are reminders. At hour 72 the next of kin is asked "is everything all right?", with a reminder at hour 120. At hour 144, if nobody has answered, the project emails each listed contact the message the owner wrote for them. A reply from the next of kin at any stage ends the sequence, and a check-in by the owner at any stage, even after the switch has fired, tells everyone already contacted that it was a false alarm.

The check-in button only counts a real click. Opening a link in the email does not, because mail scanners open links too, which would silence the switch without the owner ever having touched it.

What it will not do, by the author's own list

The project page writes out its own limits. Death Plan Switch is email-only: no SMS, no calls, no app. It stores no documents and no passwords, and the messages it sends only say where things are and who to call. It is not a hosted service, so there are no accounts and no shared instance. It cannot work if its server, scheduler or mail provider is down, which is why the author recommends hosting it apart from the sites it protects. The licence is MIT, provided as is.

What a one-person studio needs to run it

A web server with PHP 8.1 or newer, an SMTP account for outgoing mail, HTTPS, and cron or any outside scheduler that can fetch a web address every 15 minutes. Apache works as shipped and the project lists four lines of nginx configuration. The in-browser installer writes the crontab line, which is the only command-line step the author claims is needed. The repository, Romeo19361/deathplanswitch on GitHub, is MIT-licensed.

The gap it fills, in plain words

A dead man's switch is a long-standing idea and there are commercial services for individuals. Running one through a hosted account does not fit a working studio whose whole security story is that nobody else has access to anything. A self-hosted app small enough to run next to a plain website, that sends only emails and holds no secrets, is what the author could not find. For a reader whose work survives only because they log in each morning, the step worth taking today is to write the messages. The software can be installed later, and the author offers help with that at a contact page on the project site.

Source

Death Plan Switch, the project site, with the source at Romeo19361/deathplanswitch on GitHub. The Show HN launch is item 50161408 on Hacker News.

This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.