OK Computer

Inspired by the ease of installing and setting up fitter-happier as a Rails application's health check, but frustrated by its lack of flexibility, OK Computer was born. It provides a robust endpoint to perform server health checks with a set of built-in plugins, as well as a simple interface to add your own custom checks.

For more insight into why we built this, check out our blog post introducing OK Computer.

Not using Rails?

If you use Grape instead of Rails, check out okcomputer-grape.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'okcomputer'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install okcomputer

Usage

To perform the default checks (application running and ActiveRecord database connection), do nothing other than adding to your application's Gemfile.

If Not Using ActiveRecord

We also include a MongoidCheck, but do not register it. If you use Mongoid, replace the default ActiveRecord check like so:

OkComputer::Registry.register "database", OkComputer::MongoidCheck.new

If you use another database adapter, see Registering Custom Checks below to build your own database check and register it with the name "database" to replace the built-in check, or use OkComputer::Registry.deregister "database" to stop checking your database altogether.

Requiring Authentication

Optionally require HTTP Basic authentication to view the results of checks in an initializer, like so:

# config/initializers/okcomputer.rb
OkComputer.require_authentication("username", "password")

To allow access to specific checks without a password, optionally specify the names of the checks:

# config/initializers/okcomputer.rb
OkComputer.require_authentication("username", "password", except: %w(default nonsecret))

Changing the OkComputer Route

By default, OkComputer routes are mounted at /okcomputer. If you'd like to use an alternate route, you can configure it with:

# config/initializers/okcomputer.rb
OkComputer.mount_at = 'health_checks'    # mounts at /health_checks

For more control of adding OkComputer to your routes, set OkComputer.mount_at = false to disable automatic mounting, and you can manually mount the engine in your routes.rb.

# config/initializers/okcomputer.rb
OkComputer.mount_at = false

# config/routes.rb, at any priority that suits you
mount OkComputer::Engine, at: "/custom_path"

Registering Additional Checks

Register additional checks in an initializer, like so:

# config/initializers/okcomputer.rb
OkComputer::Registry.register "resque_down", OkComputer::ResqueDownCheck.new
OkComputer::Registry.register "resque_backed_up", OkComputer::ResqueBackedUpCheck.new("critical", 100)

Registering Custom Checks

The simplest way to register a check unique to your application is to subclass OkComputer::Check and implement your own #check method, which sets the display message with mark_message, and calls mark_failure if anything is wrong.

# config/initializers/okcomputer.rb
class MyCustomCheck < OkComputer::Check
  def check
    if rand(10).even?
      mark_message "Even is great!"
    else
      mark_failure
      mark_message "We don't like odd numbers"
    end
  end
end

OkComputer::Registry.register "check_for_odds", MyCustomCheck.new

Registering Optional Checks

Register an optional check like so:

# ...
OkComputer::Registry.register "some_optional_check", OkComputer::ResqueBackedUpCheck.new("critical", 100)
# ...

OkComputer.make_optional %w(some_optional_check another_optional_check)

This check will run and report its status, but will not affect the HTTP status code returned.

Customizing plain-text output

The plain-text output flows through Rails' internationalization framework. Adjust the output as necessary by defining okcomputer.check.passed and okcomputer.check.failed keys in your setup. The default values are available in okcomputer.en.yml.

Running checks in parallel

By default, OkComputer runs checks in sequence. If you'd like to run them in parallel, you can configure it with:

# config/initializers/okcomputer.rb
OkComputer.check_in_parallel = true

Performing Checks

• Perform a simple up check: http://example.com/okcomputer
• Perform all installed checks: http://example.com/okcomputer/all
• Perform a specific installed check: http://example.com/okcomputer/database

Checks are available as plain text (by default) or JSON by appending .json, e.g.:

• http://example.com/okcomputer.json
• http://example.com/okcomputer/all.json

OkComputer NewRelic Ignore

If NewRelic is installed, OkComputer automatically disables NewRelic monitoring for uptime checks, as it will start to artificially bring your request time down.

If you'd like to intentionally count OkComputer requests in your NewRelic analytics, set:

# config/initializers/okcomputer.rb
OkComputer.analytics_ignore = false

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request