Modern Python Projects Transcripts
Chapter: Let's build a CLI
Lecture: Possible improvements
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This is where we end, adding new features to our tool. But if you find it interesting and you want to actually use it,
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there are many more improvements that you can add. First of all, we can make this code asynchronous.
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Otherwise, if there is a website that takes long to respond, it will block all the other URL's. So, when you want to ping multiple url's,
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using an asynchronous code is a textbook example. You can also send an email, when the website is down.
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Python has a module called SMTP lib, that you can use to send emails. You can provide credentials, for example,
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for your Gmail account and then add a function that will send you an email when one of the website is down.
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You can also add an option to display and notification when the website goes down. Right now, when we run uptimer in a daemon mode,
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we still have to check the output in the terminal from time to time. So, it would be cool to get a pop up notification on your computer.
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This is not an easy task because every operating system uses a different tool to send desktop notifications. So if you're looking for a challenge,
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check how to display notifications on your operating system from Python and try to add it to
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our uptimer application. You can also add the script to a Cron job and have it run every minute or every five minutes.
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Cron is like automatic tasks scheduled on Linux, so if you have never used it before, you can check it out. But when you use it,
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it will run your application in a regular interval so you don't have to actually run it in a terminal all the time.
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You can add a database or a configuration file to store the list of websites that you want to monitor. That way,
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you don't have to always provide full list of url's, that you want to monitor. When you restart your application, you could start the
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URL's in the database and add some functions to add list and delete URL from the database. You can use a fancy database like Postgres SQL or mySQL.
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But Python comes with SQL module built in, so you can just import SQLlite three and create a database in the current folder
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and that that's enough to get you started. And if you want something really advanced, you can add different types of requests,
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not just the head request. All those tools that I showed you at the beginning So the uptime robot and pingdom they let you,
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for example, specify a user name and password, and then they will try to look in at your website.
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That way, you can check not only if the front page of your website is running, but for example, if the users can log in,
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so if the database is working fine, this will require a lot of changes. You need to add additional parameters to accept the user name and password.
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Then need to set up some SSL configuration to send those password securely, and you need to add support for post request to the main function.
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But when you do this, you'll have a really powerful uptime monitoring tool. In the next chapter, we will take the uptimer and publish it on pypi.