smokedetector

A simple smoke test utility for websites.

Philosophy

Smokedetector is intended to automate the most basic checks for a website. (In QA terms: It runs a smoke test.)

Smokedetector can be used to automatically check if:

• Your homepage works
• Your robots.txt and sitemap.xml are accessible
• Your landing pages are available
• Your redirect from http:// to https:// works
• any important URL is working

Preliminary configuration is kept to an absolute minimum. You have to provide

• your hostname (e.g. www.google.com)
• the URLs you want smoketest to check (e.g. "/", "/robots.txt", "/very/important/landingpage.html")

Usage

To start using smokedetector in a project, run:

npx smokedetector --init

Optional: add more URLs to the file smokedetector.json.

Whenever you want to make sure that your site is working, run:

npx smokedetector

The first time this is run, smokedetector assumes a known-good system, i.e. the responses of the system are recorded and subsequent runs of smokedetector expect the same responses to occur.

What does it do?

smokedetector reads host and path information from the file smokedetector.json. It constructs URLs and makes a request. If smokedetector has not visited the URL, the HTTP status code and (in case of redirects) the "Location"-Header is recorded. From now on, every run of smokedetector expects the same response code and "Location"-header (if applicable). If the response codes do not match the expectation, smokedetector tells you.

The smokedetector.json file

This is an example of the configuration file:

{
  "description": "This configuration is used by smokedetector. smokedetector allows you to quickly check that the most important urls on a website work. Learn more at https://github.com/digital-sailors/smokedetector",
  "servers": {
    "live": {
      "host": "www.digital-sailors.de"
    }
  },
  "urlspace": {
    "http": {
      "/": {},
      "/your/other/http/urls/here.html": {}
    },
    "https": {
      "/": {},
      "/your/other/https/urls/here.html": {}
    }
  }
}

It is created when you run npx smokedetector --init. You can add any number of URLs, ones that should work with https:// and ones that work with http://

When you run smokedetector, it records the responses in this file. The file is considered diff-aware, i.e. changes happen when something significant changed. If you find this file modified without reason, that probably means that a smoke test gave a different result than the one that was expected.

Multiple Hosts

TBA

HTTP downgrade

TBA

Advanced use cases

Compare a staging system and the live system

Handle non-HTTPS systems

License

Licensed under

Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

Contribution Licensing

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.