Website Monitor (alpha)

Website monitor using the Heroku free tier.

Design goals:

• As simple as possible
• Online but no running costs
• Configurable thresholds and selectors
• Different nofications, currently implemented are via E-mail and Pushbullet

1. Preparation

1. Get a Heroku Account and add a credit card so that you get 1000h dyno hours for free. No worries, it will not be charged.
2. Install Heroku CLI and cd website_monitor
3. Create a Heroku instance heroku create, note down the app name
4. Add dyno-metadata from Heroku Labs: heroku labs:enable runtime-dyno-metadata -a <app name>. This provides the HEROKU_APP_NAME environment variable, which we need to prevent the app from idling.

2. Configuration

.env

Create a .env file in the project root and add variables as needed

# how often the websites are checked, optional, default=300
POLLER_INTERVAL=300

After you are done, these env vars must be mirrored into Heroku. You can do that manually using the Heroku dashboard or use python env_to_heroku.py.

E-Mail Notifications

Put this into the .env file:

MAIL_ON=True
MAIL_RECIPIENTS=<email1>,<email1>,etc
MAIL_FROM=<email>
MAIL_SMTP_USERNAME=<usr>
MAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD=<pwd>
MAIL_SMTP_SSL_HOST=<host>:<port, usually 465>

Pushbullet Notifications

1. Create free account on Pushbullet
2. Edit the .env file:

PUSHBULLET_ON=True
PUSHBULLET_API_KEY=<generated access token>

websites.yaml

Add some websites to websites.yaml. See file for example.

3. Deploy

git push heroku master

How to deploy or develop locally

1. Install the Python dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt

Now you got multiple options:

• Just start the webserver: python app.py
• Start Heroku: heroku local web -f Procfile