Slacktivity Monitor

Slacktivity Monitor provides a simple, self-hosted, solution for web monitoring. When a change has been detected on a website you're monitoring, slacktivity-bot will let you know through a message in Slack. Think of it as a very barebones, open source, version of services like Pingdom.

Some Highlights:

• Monitor for any changes or for specific search terms.
• Send change notifications (with diffs) directly to a Slack channel of your choosing.
• Pretty web UI!
• Check for changes on any interval.

Installation

The best way to install Slacktivity Monitor is through npm:

npm install -g slacktivity-monitor

This will install Slacktivity Monitor to your global node_modules folder.

Database Configuration

Slacktivity Monitor uses PostgreSQL for it's database. It's easy to get started with, especially for Mac users who can install it through Homebrew using:

brew install postgres

Once you have Postgres installed, navigate to the folder containing the slacktivity_db file. This is the slacktivity-monitor folder contained in your global node-modules folder. If you don't know where your node-modules folder is, you can use the npm list -g command. On the Mac, this is usually /usr/local/lib/node_modules/slacktivity-monitor.

Once you're in that folder, run the following command:

createdb slacktivity && psql -d slacktivity -f slacktivity_db

This will create a new database that's configured properly for Slacktivity Monitor. You'll also need to setup a .env file which contains the environment variables that tell Slacktivity Monitor how to connect to the database. Here's what mine looks like on a test installation:

PGDATABASE='slacktivity'

PGHOST='localhost'

PGPORT='5432'

PGUSER=''

PGPASSWORD=''

You'll obviously need to change those values as necessary. It's also worth noting that the .env file is hidden on the Mac. If you're not sure how to work with hidden files, this is a good primer.

The .env file should be placed in the node-modules/slacktivity-monitor/bin directory, alongside the slacktivity-monitor executable.

Starting the App

You can start Slacktivity Monitor with the command: slacktivity-monitor

The command accepts one argument, a port number. If you specify a port number, it will run on that port. Otherwise, it will default to 3000.

Once the app is running, you should be able to access the web UI by visiting http://localhost:port, for example, http://localhost:3000.

Thanks

I'd like to give a special shout-out to my awesome employer, The CompoZed Lab at Allstate. Slacktivity Monitor was originally a project for one of our Open Source days, and it wouldn't be a reality otherwise. ❤️