Varanus

A tool to monitor the status of a site/address/API via cloud functions (for now GCP, but with goals to expand it).

Emails are sent only via Mailgun for now (with plans to add more providers later).

Development

Environment Variables

You'll need to configure your local environment first. Create a .env file. To send emails, you need a Mailgun API key and a domain that's properly configured with Mailgun:

MAILGUN_KEY=key-00000000000000000000000000000000
MAILGUN_DOMAIN=example.com
VARANUS_SENDER_EMAIL='Site Alert <[email protected]>'

Running Locally

Before you run locally, you'll need to source the .env file to load the variables:

set -o allexport; source .env; set +o allexport

To start serving the function locally, use go run cmd/main.go. This will serve the function on your local machine at port 8080.

To actually run the code, you need to make a request. The following curl command will execute the command, but you should change the URL/port as necessary.

curl localhost:8080 -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
        "context": {
          "eventId":"123456789",
          "timestamp":"1970-01-01T01:01:01.001Z",
          "eventType":"google.pubsub.topic.publish",
          "resource":{
            "service":"pubsub.googleapis.com",
            "name":"projects/sample-project/topics/varanus-test",
            "type":"type.googleapis.com/google.pubsub.v1.PubsubMessage"
          }
        },
        "data": {
          "@type": "type.googleapis.com/google.pubsub.v1.PubsubMessage",
          "attributes": {
             "url":"https://expired.badssl.com",
             "email":"[email protected]"
          }
        }
      }'

Deployment

Create your Secret

Before your app can send any emails, you'll need to create the secret for your Cloud Function to use (you can just specify it as an environment variable, but that's not very secure). Create a new secret by following Google's docs. Keep track of the name you use, you'll need it in a bit.

Create your Pub/Sub Topic

You'll need to create a pub/sub topic that will trigger your function. You can re-use the same topic for multiple site checks, so you can give it a generic name.

gcloud pubsub topics create <PUBSUB_TOPIC>

Create your Function

Creating the function is fairly straightforward. Run the following (filling in values as necessary) from your local clone of this repo:

gcloud functions deploy <FUNCTION_NAME> \
  --entry-point=CheckSiteAvailability \
  --runtime=go116 \
  --set-secrets 'MAILGUN_KEY=<SECRET_NAME>:<SECRET_VERSION>' \
  --set-env-vars PROJECT_ID=<PROJECT_ID> \
  --set-env-vars MAILGUN_DOMAIN=<EMAIL_DOMAIN> \
  --set-env-vars VARANUS_SENDER_EMAIL=<EMAIL_ADDRESS> \
  --set-env-vars SOURCE_DIR='./serverless_function_source_code' \
  --trigger-topic=<PUBSUB_TOPIC> \
  --project=<PROJECT_NAME> \
  --source=.

Make sure that completes successfully.

Note: I'm looking into using Cloud Functions 2nd Gen, but haven't tested it yet. So if you go that route, YMMV.

Test Triggering your Function

To perform an (almost) end-to-end test, we can manually create some messages in Pub/Sub to ensure that the function is working as expected.

For example:

gcloud pubsub topics publish <PUBSUB_TOPIC> --attribute=email="<EMAIL>",url="https://expired.badssl.com"

Assuming everything is set up correctly, that should send an email to the address specified. If you don't receive an email, check the logs for your cloud function in the Google Console, or run:

gcloud functions logs read <FUNCTION_NAME>

Schedule Periodic Runs

Finally, to make sure this is running and actually notifies you when problems arise, you need to schedule its runs.

Adjust the cron schedule as needed. The following will run the check every 5 minutes:

gcloud scheduler jobs create pubsub <JOB_NAME> --schedule="*/5 * * * *" --topic=<PUBSUB_TOPIC> --attributes=email="<EMAIL>",url="<URL_TO_CHECK>"