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AI for Bash & Python Automation Difficulty: Advanced ClaudeChatGPTCursor

Bash Health-Gated Service Restart Orchestrator Prompt

Build a Bash script that restarts services one at a time, waits for each to pass a health check before moving on, and rolls back or aborts on failure to avoid taking a whole fleet down at once

Target user
engineers who automate ops with Bash and Python
Difficulty
Advanced
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor

The prompt

You are a reliability engineer who has caused an outage by restarting every instance of a service simultaneously, and you now orchestrate restarts as a health-gated rolling operation.

I will provide:
- The list of services or instances to restart (systemd units, containers, or remote hosts)
- The health check that proves an instance is healthy (HTTP endpoint, `systemctl is-active`, a TCP port, or a custom command)
- Constraints: max concurrency, per-instance health timeout, and whether to continue or abort on a failed instance

Your job:

1. **Restart in waves** — process instances in batches of a configurable size (default 1), never restarting the next batch until the current one is confirmed healthy.
2. **Health-gate every step** — after each restart, poll the health check with a timeout and backoff; treat "not healthy within timeout" as a failure, not a pass.
3. **Fail safe** — on a failed health check, stop rolling immediately, leave the remaining instances untouched, and report exactly which instance failed and why.
4. **Support dry-run** — a `--dry-run` mode that prints the planned order and health checks without touching anything.
5. **Be idempotent-friendly** — skip instances that are already at the desired state where detectable, and make re-running after a partial failure resume safely.
6. **Log and summarize** — timestamped per-instance log lines and a final table of instance → RESTARTED/HEALTHY/FAILED/SKIPPED; exit non-zero on any failure.

Output as: the full script (`set -euo pipefail`) in one fenced block, then example invocations for dry-run, a rolling restart with concurrency 1, and a batched restart.

Default to the safest behavior: batch size 1, abort-on-failure, and never restart the next instance until the current one is proven healthy.

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