> When you are SSH'ed into your server and you need to adjust a configuration file
This is pretty much exactly what you're not supposed to do in any form of modern system administration. How would you rebuild that server, or move it to a different provider?
Edit a local definition of your server for Ansible or Salt or Puppet or whatever else, and let those systems deal with making the server match your definition.
this heavily depends on the scale of the server of course. not everyone has clusters. your VPS that hosts your blog is an example of something where Salt or Puppet would be WAY overkill.
> your VPS that hosts your blog is an example of something where Salt or Puppet would be WAY overkill.
I've used Salt for this in the past - it's not overkill, and it's good practice. Ansible is even more lightweight. You can set up a blog, an IRC bouncer, and whatever else, in practically no time. Then, when you inevitably mess it up, you can wipe it and have it running again in 10 minutes.
(At the moment, I use CoreOS on my server, so my configuration is just a bunch of Dockerfiles and fleetd unit files that I can edit locally.)
This is pretty much exactly what you're not supposed to do in any form of modern system administration. How would you rebuild that server, or move it to a different provider?
Edit a local definition of your server for Ansible or Salt or Puppet or whatever else, and let those systems deal with making the server match your definition.