web-dependencies-checker

A tool for checking the availability of web dependencies

Table of Contents

• Background
• Install
• Usage
• Contribute
• License

Background

Numerous programs and services require the ability to talk to the web in order to get their jobs done. Sometimes, firewall settings or other environmental constraints can prevent this communication from happening. This tool can be used to see if a service's web dependencies are reachable from your machine. Anyone maintaining a project with web dependencies can create a simple yaml file that the web-dependencies-checker can run against.

Install

You can download the web-dependencies-checker executable for your system from the releases page. Once downloaded, navigate to the executable's destination and run it as detailed in the following section.

Usage

This tool is invoked as follows:

./wdc [-t seconds] [-r retries] [-q] [-c] YAML_file_location [YAML_file_location...]

YAML File

The YAML_file_location argument can be either a path to a local YAML file or the url of a remote one. Urls must begin with http(s). One or more YAML files can be provided as arguments and they can be a combination of local paths and urls.

The format of the YAML file must be as follows:

---
services:
 - name: firstService
   sites:
    - site1
    - site2
 - name: secondService
   sites:
    - site3
    - site4

It can include any number of services, and each service can contain any number of urls. Multiple services can contain the same url. All urls will use TCP by default. If a url requires http(s) be sure to prepend the url with http(s)://. Wildcard subdomains are not supported. Any url with wildcards will be stripped of them before testing. IP addresses are supported.

The included YAML file test_yaml.yml is a sample list of services and urls. The following command can be used to check the services listed in that file.

./wdc yaml/test_yaml.yml

The following is the results of running the above command on my machine. Note that your machine may not produce the exact same results as mine.

Service: firstService
	 URL: gmail.com:80 TCP Dial OK
	 URL: http://youtu.be 200 OK
	 Available
Service: secondService
	 URL: slack.com:80 TCP Dial OK
	 URL: http://github.com/ibmjstart/404 404 Not Found
	 URL: http://facebook.com 200 OK
	 Unavailable
Service: thirdSerivce
	 URL: gmail.com:80 TCP Dial OK
	 URL: 172.217.4.238:80 TCP Dial OK
	 Available

Available Services
firstService
thirdSerivce

Unavailable Services
secondService

Courtesy of IBM jStart - www.ibm.com/jstart

Options

Name	Flag	Description
Timeout	-t	HTTP request timeout in seconds (defaults to 60)
Retries	-r	Number of HTTP request retries (defaults to 0)
Quiet	-q	Only display status for failed requests
No Color	-c	Disable color output

Contribute

PRs accepted.

Small note: If editing the README, please conform to the standard-readme specification.

License

Apache 2.0 © IBM jStart