🩺 Service Health Checker

A beginner-friendly Python tool that checks whether a list of services/URLs are up, logs the results, and saves a JSON report.

Built as a learning project covering Python scripting, HTTP requests, logging, file I/O, and GitHub Actions CI.

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Features

• Checks HTTP status and response time for each target
• Logs results to terminal and to logs/checker.log
• Saves a timestamped JSON report to reports/
• GitHub Actions workflow runs checks on every push and on a schedule

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Project Structure

health-checker/
├── checker.py           # Main script
├── requirements.txt     # Python dependencies
├── .gitignore
├── .github/
│   └── workflows/
│       └── health-check.yml   # CI/CD pipeline
├── logs/                # Created at runtime
└── reports/             # Created at runtime

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Getting Started

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_REPO.git
cd YOUR_REPO

2. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Run the checker

python checker.py

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Configuration

Edit the TARGETS list in checker.py to check your own URLs:

TARGETS = [
    {"name": "My App",  "url": "https://myapp.example.com"},
    {"name": "My API",  "url": "https://api.example.com/health"},
]

You can also adjust:

• TIMEOUT_SECONDS — how long to wait before marking a service as down
• The cron schedule in .github/workflows/health-check.yml

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Example Output

2024-01-15 10:30:01  INFO      Starting health checks...
2024-01-15 10:30:01  INFO      [UP]   Google — 142ms  (HTTP 200)
2024-01-15 10:30:02  INFO      [UP]   GitHub — 310ms  (HTTP 200)
2024-01-15 10:30:02  WARNING   [DOWN] Fake Service — Connection error: ...

==================================================
  HEALTH CHECK SUMMARY
==================================================
  ✅  UP:    2
  ❌  DOWN:  1

  Services down:
    - Fake Service  (Connection error: ...)
==================================================

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What I Learned

• Python scripting and project structure
• HTTP requests with the requests library
• Logging to files and stdout
• Writing JSON reports
• GitHub Actions for CI/CD automation

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Next Steps

• Add email/Slack alerts when a service goes down
• Add a retry mechanism before marking a service as DOWN
• Store results in a database (SQLite to start)
• Build a simple dashboard to visualise uptime history