Install and Run Monika in Windows without Package Managers
We provided many ways to install Monika on your system, for example using package managers like NPM, Chocolatey, or Snapcraft. But, instead of using the package managers mentioned (which we need to install first), we can simply use the standalone binaries on our GitHub releases page.
For Windows users, we have packed Monika into a single executable file. With only one executable file and a single Monika configuration, you can run Monika and monitor your endpoints right away!
This article will guide you on how to run Monika on your Windows laptop, so without further ado:
What is Monika?
Monika is an open-source and free synthetic monitoring command-line application. The name Monika stands for “Monitoring Berkala”, which means “periodic monitoring” in the Indonesian language.
With Monika, you can add as many websites as you want to monitor. You can monitor several undesirable events such as service outages or slow services. In addition, you can configure Monika to send notifications of the incidents on your services through your favorite communication tools like SMTP mail, Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp (It’s free!), and more!
Now that we want to run Monika using a standalone binary, visit the Monika GitHub release page and select the zip file according to your operating system (in this case, Windows).
Download Monika and Run
In our previous article about running macOS, your browser may display that the file is not commonly downloaded and may be dangerous. If you see this alert, head to the caret menu beside the Discard button and select Keep. If you didn’t, proceed to the next step.
Extract the zip and you should see the monika.exe file. Then, open a PowerShell terminal in your folder by right click the current directory and selecting the Open in Terminal option.
Now that the Terminal is open, verify that the monika.exe can be run by running .\monika.exe in the terminal. It should display that you don’t have any configuration available to use.
Creating a simple Monika configuration
Previously, we don’t have any configuration when running Monika. So, let’s create a new Monika configuration from this sample.
Let me explain this configuration:
- This configuration will be probing https://reqres.in/api/login using the POST method
- The body that will be passed through the request will be an email and password.
- We want to send the data as
application/jsonby specifying the Content-Type at theheadersblock. - Monika will alert you if the response time is longer than 600 milliseconds, if the response status code is not 200, or if the response time is longer than ten seconds
- Monika will alert you if there is any incident or recovery at least once.
Save this configuration as monika.yml in the same directory as the Monika binary. Now, let’s run Monika with our configuration by running .\monika.exe -c .\monika.yml in your terminal.
If you haven’t had any Monika configuration yet or you want to modify your existing Monika configuration, you can create a Monika configuration using Monika Config Generator and run Monika with your created Monika configuration.
Congratulations! You can now run Monika in Windows using the standalone binary!
Closing
Using standalone Monika binary, you won’t have to install NPM or Chocolatey in your Windows system. You can just download the binary and run it on your local machine.
If you have questions or find issues while using Monika, don’t hesitate to create an issue on Monika’s Github Issue Page. If you like this article, don’t forget to clap and share this article with your friends!
That’s it for today, see you next week!
Hyperjump is an open-source-first company providing engineering excellence service. We aim to build and commercialize open-source tools to help companies streamline, simplify, and secure the most important aspects of their modern DevOps practices.
