Self-Hosted Healthchecks

Healthchecks is open-source, and is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license.

Rather than using the hosted service at https://healthchecks.io, you have the option to host an instance yourself.

The building blocks are:

• Python 3.6+
• Django 3
• PostgreSQL or MySQL

Setting Up for Development

You can set up a development environment in a Python virtual environment on your local system to develop a new feature, write a new integration or test a bugfix.

The following instructions assume you are using a Debian-based OS.

• Install dependencies:

  $ sudo apt-get update
  $ sudo apt-get install -y gcc python3-dev python3-venv
  

• Prepare directory for project code and virtualenv. Feel free to use a different location:

  $ mkdir -p ~/webapps
  $ cd ~/webapps
  

• Prepare virtual environment (with virtualenv you get pip, we'll use it soon to install requirements):

  $ python3 -m venv hc-venv
  $ source hc-venv/bin/activate
  

• Check out project code:

  $ git clone https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks.git
  

• Install requirements (Django, ...) into virtualenv:

  $ pip install wheel
  $ pip install -r healthchecks/requirements.txt
  

• Create database tables and a superuser account:

  $ cd ~/webapps/healthchecks
  $ ./manage.py migrate
  $ ./manage.py createsuperuser
  

With the default configuration, Healthchecks stores data in a SQLite file hc.sqlite in the checkout directory (~/webapps/healthchecks).

• Run tests:

  $ ./manage.py test
  

• Run development server:

  $ ./manage.py runserver
  

At this point, the site should now be running at http://localhost:8000.

To access Django administration site, log in as a superuser, then visit http://localhost:8000/admin/.

FIXME note about no email configuration, no sendalerts, and the devserver

Next Steps

Get the source code.

See Configuration for a list of configuration options.