Uptime Monitoring

By VoteAmerica

Citizens have an interest in ensuring that state web sites providing voter tools are online and available, particularing during the period leading up to an election or an election-related deadline. Normal site uptime monitoring tools are insufficient, however, for a few reasons:

• Simply checking whether the web server is responding is not sufficient, however, as backend systems may go down and result in a friendly "Currently Unavailable" message. Puptime checks for specific keywords on the resulting pages.

• Many states employ generic security tools or appliances that have a tendency to block external tools that are regularly monitoring a web page. Puptime makes it's page checks indistinguisable from humans by (1) using selenium to do a "normal" page load from a browser instance, and (2) directing those page loads through a dynamically-deployed and short-lived proxy server.

Puptime also archives the page source and a snapshot (PNG) of every page load for future reference.

To see puptime deployed: https://uptime.voteamerica.com/

Deploys

Deploys can only be done manually right now.

First, build and push the container process(es) to Heroku:

heroku container:push web --app=voteamerica-uptime --recursive

(Although there are other Dockerfiles, currently only web is used.)

Next, once the container has been built successfully, release it:

heroku container:release web --app=voteamerica-uptime

Run migrations if needed:

heroku run python manage.py migrate --app=voteamerica-uptime

Development

1. Configure your environment by copying the example file: cp .env.example .env You'll want to set any values that you need to change

2. Build and start the server:make up

3. Run migrations: make migrate

4. There aren't any tests yet, but you would run them this way: make test

5. Create a super user: make createsuperuser

Note: see the Makefile for more tasks that you might be interested in