As someone who has just gone through this, I would say from scratch. ezjails and some of the others really do seem like the definition of leaky abstractions if

As someone who has just gone through this, I would say from scratch. ezjails and some of the others really do seem like the definition of leaky abstractions if you expect a nice layer on top. They're more like handy reusable shell functions. If you learn from scratch (which again, isn't far removed from those helper packages), you'll have a better understanding for when you get stuck.