An alternative to Uptime Robot

So a few days ago I found a project called Upptime, basically it is a uptime monitor and status page completely powered by Github Actions, an advantage is that you can ping unlimited websites/servers without limit unlike Uptime Robot that only lets you use 50 monitors in the free plan.

In today's tutorial I will show you how to make one like mine.

Definitions

Github Actions

Github Actions are a new feature recently introduced by GitHub, they allow you to run scripts when an event happens on a repository (for example a commit) or every x minutes. This is called Continuous Integration.

Get started

All right, so the first thing we are gonna do is create a new repository from the template. Click here, put anything in the repo name and make sure to check "Include all banches" otherwise it won't work.

After that you are going to enable Github pages in the settings of your new repo.

Third step, add repository secrets, to make commits and publish the website you need to provide a personal access token (PAT) with repo and workflow scope, make sure to copy it, you are not seeing it again.

After generating your token, add it as a repository secret called GH_PAT

Almost done

Go to your .upptimerc.yml file and update the owner and repo:

owner: your-username# GitHub username
repo:  repo-name

Now we are gonna add the websites we want to ping so in the same file (.upptimerc.yml) set the sites your want to ping:

sites:
  - name: Repl.it
    url: https://repl.it/
  - name: DuckDuckGo
 	url: https://duckduckgo.com/

Done, commit those changes and make sure you read .uptimerc.yml file to set up other configurations and a custom domain or the default one provided by GitHub.

The information about the websites will be updated automatically, show graphs and display the ping.

This will keep your repls online (:

By the way follow me on GitHub https://github.com/forerosantiago

Important Edit

I have been investigating this problem, I found out that github runs the actions as soon as they have a machine available, which means it's not running the action every 5 minutes as requested . So sadly upptime is not an option to ping repls consistently and keep em alive. Sorry, looks like we'll have to keep using uptime robot

Happy coding