artisin / redbot

REDbot is lint for HTTP.

REDbot

REDbot is lint for HTTP resources.

It checks HTTP resources for feature support and common protocol problems. You can use the public instance on https://redbot.org/, or you can install it locally and use it on the command line, or even self-host your own Web checker.

Contributing to REDbot

Your ideas, questions and other contributions are most welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Setting Up Your Own REDbot

Requirements

REDbot needs:

1. Python 3.7 or greater
2. thor
3. markdown
4. netaddr
5. Jinja2

Once you have Python, you can install the required libraries with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Installation

Unpack the REDbot tarball. The relevant files are:

• bin/redbot_cgi.py - the Web CGI script for running REDbot
• bin/redbot_cli - the command-line interface
• redbot/ - REDbot's Python library files
• redbot/assets/ - REDbot's CSS stylesheet and JavaScript library

To install from source (e.g., if you clone from github):

python setup.py install

installs REDbot's libraries as well as the command-line version as redbot_cli.

Setting up your Web Server

To run REDbot as a CGI script, place redbot_cgi.py where you wish it to be served from by the Web server, and place config.txt in the same directory.

For example, with Apache you can put it in a directory and add these configuration directives (e.g., in `.htaccess, if enabled):

  AddHandler cgi-script .py
  DirectoryIndex redbot_cgi.py

If the directory is the root directory for your server "example.com", this will configure REDbot to be at the URI "http://example.com/".

You can also locate config.txt somewhere else, and indicate its path in an environment variable:

 SetEnv REDBOT_CONFIG /path/to/config.txt

The contents of the assets directory also need to be made available on the server; by default, they're in the 'static' subdirectory of the script's URI. This can be changed using the 'static_root' configuration variable in config.txt.

You should also create the directory referenced by the 'save_dir' configuration variable, and make sure that it's writable to the Web server process. This is where RED stores state files, and you should configure a cron job to regularly clean it. For example:

0 * * * * find /var/state/redbot/ -mmin +360 -exec rm {} ;

Running REDbot as a systemd Service

REDbot can run as a standalone service, managed by systemd. This offers a degree of sandboxing and resource management, as well as process monitoring (including a watchdog function).

To do this, clone the repo to your system and copy extra/redbot.service into the appropriate directory (on most systems, /etc/systemd/system/.)

Modify the file appropriately; this is only a sample. In particular, you will need to adjust the first part of BindReadOnlyPaths to suit the location of the REDbot directory for you.

Then, as root:

systemctl reload-daemon

systemctl enable redbot

systemctl start redbot

By default, REDbot will listen on localhost port 8000. This can be adjusted in config.txt. Running REDbot behind a reverse proxy is recommended, if it is to be exposed to the Internet.

Running REDbot with Docker

If you wish to run REDbot using Docker, get a local copy of the repository, then:

docker build -t redbot .

Start the webserver:

docker run -p 8000:80 redbot

Or, just:

make docker

to run REDbot on port 8000.

Credits

Icons by Font Awesome. REDbot includes code from tippy.js and prettify.js.