What is a pilot file?

A SlickStack pilot file is a small bash script that any developer, team, or company can maintain to make it easier/faster to manage multiple SlickStack servers.

We recommend the “secret Gist” feature on GitHub, which allows you to generate a file that can be wget without allowing search engine indexing.

Within the pilot file your team can keep variables that are typical for your SlickStack servers. The idea is that it saves time during setup of new SS servers and you can also nearly immediately update dozens or hundreds of SlickStack servers via that file, too, by simply adjusting the values of your pilot variables.

Why is this necessary? Because SlickStack is a public FOSS project, so our cron jobs and bash scripts are all public on GitHub.

You can think of the pilot file as a kind of “env vars” or environment variables for ONLY your team’s servers, so that you don’t need to SSH into 100+ different SlickStack servers to simply e.g. change a PHP setting or Nginx setting. Using the pilot file you can rapidly CHANGE the default SlickStack settings on multiple servers at once, without having to login at all.

NOTE: even if your Gist file is secret, it’s still not a good idea to keep passwords, etc in your pilot file. This feature is experimental, so please offer your feedback regarding which variables you think we should support or not support within the pilot file!