Writing runbooks
REQUIRED BACKGROUND: the technical-writing skill (hard rules, truth rules, style).
Overview
The reader is in a hurry, often mid-incident. Every runbook is ordered, one action per step, copy-pasteable, with danger marked where the eye already is.
Write from a real run: every step one actually taken, every failure named one that actually happened. A procedure imagined at the desk is a draft, not a runbook. A partially exercised procedure may be published with per-branch honesty: name the variant that has not run yet, mark that branch draft, and ask its first real runner to report back. A procedure with no real run behind any branch is a draft outright. When a value the commands need is genuinely unknown, keep the placeholder visibly bracketed, never invented, and fill it from a real run before publishing; truth outranks paste-readiness.
When to invoke, and not
Invoke for anything a person will execute: runbooks, setup and release procedures, troubleshooting entries, operational checklists, and the operator-facing strings inside a system. Do NOT invoke for design rationale (writing-design-docs) or for reference material nobody executes. If the procedure has not been run at least once, either run it first or label the document a draft; publishing an untested procedure as a runbook is the defect, not the labeling.
Structure
- Title carries the scope: "MVP runbook (Reddit)", "Release runbook".
- Open with what this document is relative to its siblings ("this doc is the sequence; deep detail per step lives in X") and state what it does NOT cover.
- Legend up front when steps differ in risk, applied to every command: safe to run anytime / operator-only (writes to production) / manual step outside the terminal. Tags combine where a step is more than one thing.
- TL;DR happy path first, then the same steps as numbered sections for the reader who needs only one.
- Version-pinned prerequisites before any command, each with a check command.
- Numbered ordinal steps (not bullets), one action each, present tense or imperative, with a visible actor.
- Every command copy-pasteable as-is, with concrete example values ("common paths:
/public_html/,/www/"). Label variants inside the code block:
- Ordered steps state the consequence of wrong ordering inline: "deploy jar, then DB cleanup; wrong order = silent data loss."
- Every state-changing procedure names its rollback, or states plainly that none exists and what that means.
- End with a "verify it worked" section: the observable end state and the command that proves it.
- Mark the preferred path "(recommended)" when several paths exist; document UI and CLI for the same task side by side rather than twice.
- If the runbook will shrink when tooling lands, say so: "when X lands, steps 2 to 4 become one command and this document keeps only the judgment."
Troubleshooting entries
Symptom-first:
Order diagnostic steps cheapest first. Group entries by failure class. Cross-link the deeper doc instead of inlining it.
Migration and deprecation guides
A migration guide is a runbook whose subject is the change itself: everything above applies, plus five rules of its own. The argument for the migration is a design doc (writing-design-docs), the decision to deprecate is an ADR (recording-decisions), the announcement is a changelog entry (writing-changelogs); this section covers only the guide the reader executes.
- History is the content here, stated positively. The before/after comparison is the job, not a violation: this is the document class the no-history hard rule explicitly carves out. Write "the tag now replaces the manual version bump" freely; that sentence is banned everywhere else and load-bearing here.
- The mapping table is the core artifact. Old to new per behavior, config key, command, or API, one row each. Prose explains the rows that need it; the table carries the migration.
- Rollback is mandatory, per step. Every step names its undo, or states plainly that it is irreversible and what that means for the ordering around it.
- The deprecation contract carries dates. What stops working, on which date, what happens to stragglers, and where the escape hatch is until then. "Will be removed in a future release" names no date and is banned here.
- Born with an expiry. When the migration completes, the owner reclassifies the guide as historical and adds the superseded banner pointing at the current-state documentation, never deleting it silently. State the completion condition in the guide itself.
Operator-facing strings
Error messages and log lines are runbook prose with the shortest reading window: keep remediation specific and actionable, and make error states visible rather than letting workflows appear healthy.
