October means Hacktoberfest: Contribute to open-source software by contributing to Monika!
Hacktoberfest 2021 has come! Hacktoberfest is an annual event held for a month-long in October to invite open-source software enthusiasts, beginners, and the developer community by contributing to open-source projects. By this year, Hacktoberfest had been held for eight years by DigitalOcean.
Most of us are familiar with open-source software such as React, Go, MongoDB, and any other software that you use in your personal and professional work. Open-source projects keep the internet humming. But alas, they can’t do it without resources, which means all the efforts done, the time elapsed developing the software, and the people involved in the project matter most.
That’s why once a year, Hacktoberfest encourages you to support open-source projects by donating or contribute to their projects. As a reward, you could choose one of the prizes: Hacktoberfest T-Shirts as swag, or you can have a tree planted in your name and help make Hacktoberfest 2021 more carbon neutral.
This year Hyperjump Technology is becoming a Hacktoberfest maintainer, to which we will be creating issues for you to contribute. This month, you can contribute to our synthetic monitoring tool: Monika!
For those who are new with 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 conditions such as service outages or slow services. Also, you can configure Monika to send notifications of the incidents on your services through your favorite communication tools like SMTP mail, Telegram, WhatsApp (It’s free!), etc.
Contributing to Monika
Monika uses TypeScript, so if you know TypeScript, then you can jump straight away. Currently, we have five issues that you can work with. Here is the general description of the issues:
Windows Desktop Notification is Not Working
When you monitor a website using Monika, Monika will notify you that your website is down or slow if it hits a certain threshold. For example, suppose Monika hits your website three times, and it doesn’t respond properly. In that case, it will send you a notification according to your configuration.
Our current problem is that Monika cannot send the notification on Windows. It seems that there is a bug in the Powershell script to spawn the desktop notification. Maybe you could help?
Prettify Email Notification
Besides desktop notification, Monika could send you a notification to your email using an SMTP server. But here’s the problem: it’s ugly.
We looked over Mailgen, and we think it’s a good idea to use Mailgen to prettify our email notification. We believe you can do it.
Add Auto Install Script in UNIX Installation
Have you ever seen Volta installation documentation? It is said that we can install Volta in our UNIX-based system using this one command:
curl https://get.volta.sh | bashIs it possible for new users to install Monika using just one command? With your help, it may become possible.
Prettify and Fix Slack Recovery Message
Just like our email notifications, our Slack notifications lack aesthetics. Also, it seems that the recovery message is not according to plan:
If you have used Slack or developed an integration between Slack and your internal tools, you can tackle this issue.
Watch Postman collections and HAR file changes
Monika will listen for configuration changes in real-time when it is running. Currently, it only listens for YAML configuration files that Monika Config Generator has generated.
Did you know that you can use Postman collections and HAR files to monitor your website? Just export your files and load them up with Monika. Unfortunately, if you modify the file while Monika is running, it doesn’t listen for changes. Maybe you can add the listeners for Postman collections and HAR files.
Closing
Hacktoberfest is an annual event to encourage developers to contribute to open-source software. This year, we joined Hacktoberfest as a repository maintainer for Monika so that you could help us developing free and open-source synthetic monitoring tools.
If you have tried Monika and found bugs, you can create an issue on our Github page. Maybe we can label it as a Hacktoberfest issue so that you can get your award for Hacktoberfest while contributing to Monika.
That is all for today. Thank you so much for reading this article. Happy hacking!
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 its modern DevOps practices.
