status.blaetter.de

Public overview of whether the services of Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik are up. The page is for a quick look only; alerting is handled by the monitoring services themselves.

A GitHub Actions workflow queries updown.io and healthchecks.io, writes status.json and publishes the page with GitHub Pages, so the page does not depend on the monitored infrastructure. The page itself is in German, as it is meant for the Blätter team and readers.

What becomes public

Only what config.json lists:

• Websites (updown.io): display name, up or down, days until the TLS certificate expires. Checks not listed under websites are left out.
• Servers and backups (healthchecks.io): the label from config.json, the check state (up, grace, down, new, paused) and the time of the last ping.

Check names, measurements, error messages and ping URLs are never published. The build uses read-only API keys, which do not expose ping URLs at all.

Files

File	Purpose
index.html, assets/	the page; logo and fonts are served from this repository, nothing is loaded from third parties
status.json	sample data for local preview ("sample": true); replaced by the workflow on deploy
config.json	which checks appear, under which label and in which order
scripts/build-status.sh	builds status.json from both APIs (curl, jq)
tests/run.sh	tests the build script against the sample responses in tests/fixtures/
.github/workflows/status.yml	test, build and deploy; weekly keepalive commit
.github/dependabot.yml	monthly pull requests for new versions of the GitHub Actions used

Setup

1. Repository secrets (Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions), both read-only keys:
   • UPDOWN_API_KEY: updown.io → Settings → API
   • HEALTHCHECKS_API_KEY: healthchecks.io → project → Settings → API Access
2. Settings → Pages: source GitHub Actions.
3. Trigger: GitHub runs short schedules unreliably, so an external scheduler calls the workflow every 5 minutes:
   • Fine-grained personal access token, resource owner blaetter, only this repository, permission Actions: Read and write.
   • POST https://api.github.com/repos/blaetter/status/actions/workflows/status.yml/dispatches with the headers Authorization: Bearer <token>, Accept: application/vnd.github+json, X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28 and the body {"ref":"main"}. A successful call returns 204.
   • The token expires; renew it in time. If it stops working, the page shows its data as outdated after 20 minutes.
4. Custom domain: verify blaetter.de for the organization (Settings → Pages → Verified domains), set status.blaetter.de as custom domain of this repository, add a CNAME record status → blaetter.github.io, then enable Enforce HTTPS.

Local preview

python3 -m http.server 8765

Open http://localhost:8765; it shows the sample data from status.json.

With real data (keys only in your own shell, never commit them):

UPDOWN_API_KEY=… HEALTHCHECKS_API_KEY=… scripts/build-status.sh /tmp/status.json

Adding checks

Create the check at updown.io or healthchecks.io, then add it to config.json: websites by host name under websites, healthchecks.io checks by their name with a label and a group (servers or backups). Labels are shown on the page, so keep them free of internal details.

Maintenance

• GitHub Actions: Dependabot opens a pull request when a new version is released. Review and merge it.
• Runner image: the workflow uses ubuntu-latest, which GitHub keeps updated. The build only needs bash, curl and jq, so image changes are not expected to matter.
• Access token of the external scheduler: renew before it expires.

Licenses

The fonts in assets/fonts/ are Playfair Display (SIL Open Font License 1.1) and Droid Sans (Apache License 2.0); see the license files next to them. The logo belongs to Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik.