Web Status Monitor

This project develops a web status monitor (simplified version of uptimerobot.com) to practice web programming and understand the web related protocols: HTTP and TLS/SSL.

• Implements HTTP client socket to interact with the web server
• Doesn't use any existing HTTP client library
• Uses an existing SSL library to help implement the HTTPS client (extra credit)

Requirements

• Anaconda OR Miniconda

Tip

If you have trouble deciding between Anaconda and Miniconda, please refer to the table below:

Anaconda	Miniconda
New to conda and/or Python	Familiar with conda and/or Python
Not familiar with using terminal and prefer GUI	Comfortable using terminal
Like the convenience of having Python and 1,500+ scientific packages automatically installed at once	Want fast access to Python and the conda commands and plan to sort out the other programs later
Have the time and space (a few minutes and 3 GB)	Don't have the time or space to install 1,500+ packages
Don't want to individually install each package	Don't mind individually installing each package

Typing out entire Conda commands can sometimes be tedious, so I wrote a shell script (conda_shortcuts.sh on GitHub Gist) to define shortcuts for commonly used Conda commands.

Example: Delete/remove a conda environment named test_env

• Shortcut command

  rmenv test_env
  

• Manually typing out the entire command

  conda env remove -n test_env && rm -rf $(conda info --base)/envs/test_env

The shortcut has 80.8% fewer characters!

Installation

1. Verify that conda is installed

   conda --version
   

2. Ensure conda is up to date

   conda update conda
   

3. Enter the directory you want web-status-monitor to be cloned in

   • POSIX

     cd ~/path/to/directory

   • Windows

     cd C:\Users\user\path\to\directory

4. Clone and enter web-status-monitor

   git clone https://github.com/lynkos/web-status-monitor.git && cd web-status-monitor

5. Create virtual environment from environment.yml

   conda env create -f environment.yml

Usage

1. Activate monitor (i.e., virtual environment)

   conda activate monitor

2. Confirm monitor is active
   • monitor should be in parentheses () or brackets [] before your command prompt, e.g.

     (monitor) $

   • See which virtual environments are available and/or currently active (active environment denoted with asterisk (*))

     conda info --envs

     OR

     conda env list

3. Run monitor.py (urls_file is the path to a file containing a list of URLs)

   python monitor.py urls_file

4. Deactivate monitor (i.e., virtual environment) when finished

   conda deactivate