Outpost is me, scratching my own itch. For a while now, freelancing or working
\nfor others, I work with pretty much all the stack in web development: from front-end
\ndevelopment with HTML and CSS up to the system administration.<\/p>\n
And sometimes, I screw up. Sometimes, stuff go wrong. Maybe that Sphinx
\nisn’t getting indexed or even running after an unsuccessful deploy. Maybe that
\nbackground job isn’t being run, and I forget to verify it.<\/p>\n
I know there are excellent tools that already solve this problem. But I wanted an And thus the Outpost idea was born. Outpost is a framework so I can easily Outpost is basically a DSL where you can describe rules to monitor your In this example, we are monitoring (using what I’ve called ‘Scouts’) HTTP There is still a lot of work to be done, but I feel it is ready for a very first Also, there are only three expectation matchers: response time, response body Below is another example of an Outpost, based on the integration tests:<\/p>\n For more details, please check the project’s README, on GitHub<\/a>.<\/p>\n My plans for Outpost are: SSH support, so you can connect to servers that do Crazy idea: wouldn’t it be nice to have a script that reads Outposts and This project was my personal project for RMU (Ruby Mendicant University) and Please share your thoughts about this project. I would love to know your opinion!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Outpost is me, scratching my own itch. For a while now, freelancing or working for others, I work with pretty much all the stack in web development: from front-end development with HTML and CSS up to the system administration. And sometimes, I screw up. Sometimes, stuff go wrong. Maybe that Sphinx isn’t getting indexed or … \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[138,139,137,60],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1731"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1752,"href":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731\/revisions\/1752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\neasy way I would be able to code my own monitoring rules, using one of the
\nlanguages I like the most. And also, the fantastic Aaron Patterson (or
\ntenderlove), one of the most prominent faces of the Ruby community once told in
\na Q&A at RMU<\/a>: it should be fun!<\/p>\n
\nimplement Ruby code that query the current state of any service I want. I can
\nalso write code that can go into the database and do a SELECT on a table (a
\njobs table, for example) to check if everything’s fine.<\/p>\nWhat is Outpost?<\/h3>\n
\nservice, application, server, whatever. Below is a very simple example:<\/p>\nrequire 'outpost'\r\nrequire 'outpost\/scouts'\r\n\r\nclass MyWebPageOutpost < Outpost::DSL\r\n using Outpost::Scouts::Http => \"web page\" do\r\n options :host => 'localhost', :port => 3000\r\n report :up, :response_code => 200\r\n report :down, :response_body => {:match => \/Ops\/}\r\n end\r\nend<\/pre>\n
\ncommunication to localhost:3000<\/code>. It will report that the system is
\nup if the response code is 200 (HTTP OK) and report that it is down if the
\nresponse body contains the word “Ops”, by matching a Regular Expression to it.<\/p>\n
\nrelease. There are only two Scouts today: HTTP and Ping, but it’s so
\neasy to write new ones that I will be releasing a few more in the next
\ndays.<\/p>\n
\nand response code. I believe they are able to cover most of the cases, but it is also
\nvery easy to write new expectations.<\/p>\nrequire 'outpost'\r\nrequire 'outpost\/scouts'\r\n\r\nclass ExamplePingAndHttp < Outpost::DSL\r\n using Outpost::Scouts::Http => 'master http server' do\r\n options :host => 'localhost', :port => 9595, :path => '\/'\r\n report :up, :response_body => {:match => \/Up\/}\r\n end\r\n\r\n using Outpost::Scouts::Ping => 'load balancer' do\r\n options :host => 'localhost'\r\n report :up, :response_time => {:less_than => 500}\r\n end\r\nend<\/pre>\nThe future<\/h3>\n
\nnot expose their services to the outer world, a very simple web dashboard to show
\nthe results, better error reporting (for now you can only know which Scout
\nfailed, but not why), a script that automatically generates Outposts for Rails
\napps, and the list goes on!<\/p>\n
\ntells if a machine is ready to be in production? TDD for machines? Woot!<\/p>\nThanks<\/h3>\n
\nso I would like to thank all the people involved for the amazing experience and
\nreviews on the project. Also thanks to my friends for listening me nagging
\nabout this project for a while. Finally, thanks to Tom\u00e1s D’Stefano, who
\ndid some work on my previous attempt to write Outpost, your work won’t be
\nthrown away.<\/p>\nClosing<\/h3>\n