Show HN: Attempt – A CLI for retrying fallible commands https://bit.ly/3JRFp0x

Show HN: Attempt – A CLI for retrying fallible commands Hi HN, Here's a tool I wrote for retrying fallible commands. Nothing groundbreaking here, this is a tool that's been made many times (and several have been submitted to Show HN). Though this one does have a more comprehensive feature set than most. I hope one or two people will find it useful. I wrote `attempt` for two reasons: - To have a more featureful alternative to `wait-for-it.sh` for use in Docker Compose. Specifically to apply migration scripts to a database that may not be up yet. I wanted to be able to inspect the error messages from my migration tool & retry on connection errors. - To test a hypothesis I had that a good way to make a CLI was to copy the API of a good library (in this case, `tenacity`). I want to write a blog post at some point to discuss this at length, but the tl;dr is that I believe it was a success. Here are some usage examples: https://bit.ly/46uBpvG There may not be much to discuss for such a small tool, but I am open to all feedback and am happy to answer any questions. Cheers, Max https://bit.ly/4ptrjTs September 9, 2025 at 02:37AM