Updated Site Monitoring

What seemed like forever ago, I put together a small project for simple site monitoring. My md-to-conf work enhanced my Python skills, and I thought it would be a good time to update the monitoring project.

Housekeeping!

First things first: I transferred the repository from my personal GitHub account to the spydersoft-consulting organization. Why? Separation of concerns, mostly. Since I fork open source repositories into my personal, I do not want the open source projects I am publishing to be mixed in with those forks.

After that, I went through the process of converting my source to a package with GitHub Actions to build and publish to PyPi.org. I also added testing, formatting, and linting, copying settings and actions from the md_to_conf project.

Oh, SonarQube

Adding the linting with SonarQube added a LOT of new warnings and errors. Everything from long lines to bad variable names. Since my build process does not succeed if those types of things are found, I went through the process of fixing all those warnings.

The variable naming ones were a little difficult, as some of my classes mapped to the configuration file serialization. That meant that I had to change my configuration files as well as the code. I went through a few iterations, as I missed some.

I also had to add a few tests, just so that the tests and coverage scripts get run. Could I have omitted the tests entirely? Sure. But a few tests to read some sample configuration files never hurt anyone.

Complete!

I got everything renamed and building pretty quickly, and added my PyPi.org API token to the repository for the actions. I quickly provisioned a new analysis project in SonarCloud, and merged everything into main. Created a new GitHub release, which triggered a new publish to PyPi.org.

Setting up the Raspberry Pi

The last step was to get rid of the code on the Raspberry Pi, and use pip to install the package. This was relatively easy, with a few caveats.

1. Use pip3 install instead of pip – Forgot the old Pi has both Python 2 and 3 installed.
2. Fix the config files – I had to change my configuration file to reflect the variable name changes.
3. Change the cron job – This one needs a little more explanation

For the last one, when changing the cron job, I had to point specifically to /usr/local/bin/pi-monitor, since that’s where pip installed it. My new cron job looks like this:

SHELL=/bin/bash

*/5 * * * * pi cd /home/pi && /usr/local/bin/pi-monitor -c monitor.config.json 2>&1 | /usr/bin/logger -t PIMONITOR

That runs the application and logs everything to syslog with the PIMONITOR tag.

Did this take longer than I expected? Yea, a little. Is it nice to have another open source project in my portfolio. Absolutely. Check it out if you are interested!