python monitoring client

arke is a dumb python monitoring client i am currently working on to monitor http status and docker container runtime.

http status:

• monitor znc server http status
• monitor pleroma server http status

docker runtime:

• slackbot

structure

• runtime file
• vars file that points the client at my servers

TODO

• Fix loading json from file
  • alright see "json loading" heading in this file.
• Fix state comparison and post to only post the item that has changed since last run
  • i thought I mostly had this fixed but i'm still running into issues.
  • requires some additional digging.
• update this readme.

json loading

confused here. in python, a dict is the key/value store that is used to map to json. all my functions return a dict:

def monitor_HttpTargets(monitoringtargets):
    responseTable = {}
	...
    return responseTable


def monitor_DomainExpiry(targets):
    responseTable = {}
	...
    return responseTable


def monitor_TlsExpiry(targets):
    responseTable = {}
	...
    return responseTable

Ok so that part's straight forward. Then, i combine all of them into a single keyed dict, so I have a dict of dicts:

    datastore = {}
    
    datastore['http'] = monitor_HttpTargets(arkevars.httpTargets)
    datastore['certs'] = monitor_TlsExpiry(arkevars.tlsTargets)
    datastore['whois'] = monitor_DomainExpiry(arkevars.domains_to_check)

OK again, straight forward. Here's where shit gets less obvious to me. I need to convert this variable containing a dict into a json object in a file. I do this like so:

# write new results to file
with open(this_round_file, "a+", encoding="utf-8") as outfile:
	json.dump(datastore, outfile, ensure_ascii=False, sort_keys=True)

ok, so crafting the json object seems to make sense, and seems to be pretty straight forward. What about reading the 'json' object? WELL THEREIN LIES THE TALE MY GOOD BITCH

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "arke.py", line 114, in <module>
    json_data = json.load(json_File)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/json/__init__.py", line 293, in load
    return loads(fp.read(),
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/json/__init__.py", line 357, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/json/decoder.py", line 340, in decode
    raise JSONDecodeError("Extra data", s, end)
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Extra data: line 1 column 133 (char 132)

this is where I get. loading that file doesn't work. Which seems to suggest that how I'm crafting the json string written to the file with json.dump is problematic! But I haven't figured out /why/ ugh.

fixed

oh my god i wasn't cleaning up the file after last run so previous run charactes was fucking up the file!!! aaaah!