Free website monitoring with instant push notification alerts

Arjun Komath — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 22:11:56 +0000

In this article, I’ll help you set up a free and simple website monitoring tool which sends instant alerts using push notification. Before we begin, let’s have a look a what we will need:

a website URL to test, obviously
a computer/server to run our bash script
a free account at push.techulus.com, we will be using Push by Techulus for delivering real-time push notifications.

What is a website monitoring service? It’s simply a tool that lets us check if our website/server is live or not and also send us instant alerts the moment our website/server goes down. There are many SaaS platform which has several other advanced features, but in this tutorial, we will keep things simple.

Before we start, make sure you’ve set up your account at push.techulus.com, installed the app on your device and copied the API key.

Get the API key from Push console

Here is the bash script we will be using. You’ve to make two changes:

change the website URL in the script to the one you want to monitor
Update the file with API key from push.techulus.com

!/bin/bash

# This script will check to see if a website is up/down by pinging the url
# your url 
url="http://blahblahblah.com"
# your api key from https://push.techulus.com/ 
push_api_key=""
# push settings 
sendNotification(){
 curl -X "POST" "https://push.techulus.com/api/v1/notify/${push_api_key}" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8' \
  -d "{
 \"title\": \" $1 \",
 \"body\": \" $2 \"
}"
}
# check url 
wget --server-response --spider --tries=3 $url
# This wget will only return exit 0 if response is 200 ok
if [ "$?" -eq 0 ] # so if we have exit status of zero then server is UP
then
 exit 0
else
 echo "DOWN | `date`"
 sendNotification "$url is DOWN" "DOWN | `date`"
 exit 0
fi

All you need to do is, download this script into your machine or server and keep running this script in a regular interval using something like cronjob and we’re done! That’s it! 🥳

The script tries to load our website and if it fails (the server doesn’t respond with status code 200 OK), we assume that something has gone wrong and trigger a push notification.

Make sure you run this script frequently so that we can be alerted on time. To run this script every minute using cronjob, we can add the following command to crontab. Open crontab using the command

crontab -e

and then add the following line:

* * * * * /bin/bash /path_to_your_file/script.sh

Make sure that you add the correct and absolute path to the script file on your machine/server.

Feel free to modify the script, maybe change the message to make it more meaningful or more contextual. Before I wrap this up, huge shoutout to vbarrier. The bash script I’m using here is a modified version of his script.

Feel free to leave comments in case you have any questions.

Thank you!

How to: Get push notifications from GitHub

Arjun Komath — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 09:23:23 +0000

If you’ve got a mobile phone, then you probably know what push notifications are. A push notification (also known as a server push notification) is the delivery of information to a computing device from an application server where the request for the transaction is started by the server rather than by an explicit request from the client.

We will use Push (push.techulus.com) as the medium for receiving push notifications.

In this article, we’ll be discussing how we can get notifications from GitHub as push notifications on our device.

Let’s get started

We will setup a real-time push notification workflow using GitHub actions (FYI, we could do the same using Zapier integration also). Before we start, make sure you’ve setup your account at push.techulus.com, installed the app on your device and copied the API key.

Now that we have everything ready, let’s create our workflow on GitHub. We will create a workflow that sends a push notification whenever there is a new issue in our repository.

Step 1. Open your GitHub repository page (I will use this repository https://github.com/arjunkomath/ama) and go to Actions page.

Step 2. To create a new workflow click on “New workflow” or “Set up a workflow yourself” button. Now GitHub will draft a new workflow for you with an echo Hello, world! command. Let’s change this and add our custom action.

Step 3. Rename the file to issues_push.yml and then paste the following into your editor.

name: Notify issues

on:
  issues:
    types: [opened]

jobs:
  push:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Send Push Notification
      uses: techulus/push-github-action@v0.0.2
      env:
        API_KEY: ${{ secrets.PUSH_API_KEY }}
        MESSAGE: "There is a new issue 😅"</span>

Let’s go through the lines one by one:

The first line defines the name of this workflow
The second line specify the trigger for this workflow, in our case it is when a new issue is opened
Next we have defined a job push that runs on ubuntu-latest , the virtual environment in which our workflow commands will be executed.
Finally, we have the steps for the workflow which is to send the actual notification. We will use Send Push Notification action that has been published to GitHub marketplace.
Below that we’ve specified our API_KEY as a secret and at last the message for our notification. We will see how to create a secret in a moment.

Commit this file to master and we have created our workflow! 🎉

Step 4. Before testing the notification we have to create a secret to store our API_KEY . Open your repository settings and go to secrets tab and then click on Add a new secret.

Enter the name as PUSH_API_KEY (we specified this in our workflow using secrets.PUSH_API_KEY ) and enter the API key you copied from push console as the value. Click on Add secret and we’re done!

Time to test our workflow, create a new issue in your repository and momentarily you should get the notification on your device.

We can reuse the same action to implement different notifications based on different triggers. You can find more examples on the marketplace page https://github.com/marketplace/actions/send-push-notification.

Feel free to leave comments in case you have any questions.

Thank you!

Forem: Arjun Komath

Free website monitoring with instant push notification alerts

How to: Get push notifications from GitHub

Let’s get started