SilverStripe Environment Checker Module

This module adds an API for running environment checks to your API.

• health/check - A public URL that performs a quick check that this environment is functioning. This could be tied to a load balancer, for example.
• dev/check - An admin-only URL that performs a more comprehensive set of checks. This could be tied to a deployment system, for example.
• dev/check/<suite> - Check a specific suite (admin only)

Aren't these just unit tests?

Almost, but not really. Environment checks differ from unit tests in two important ways:

• They test environment specific settings. Unit tests are designed to use dummy data and mock interfaces to external system. Environment checks check the real systems and data that the given environment is actually connected to.
• They can't modify data. Because these checks will run using production databases, they can't go modifying the data in there. This is the biggest reason why we haven't used the same base class as a unit test for writing environment checks - we wanted to make it impossible to accidentally plug a unit test into the environment checker!

Installation

$ composer require silverstripe/environmentcheck

You'll also need to run /dev/build.

Activating Directly

Register checks in your own _config.php - see the _config.php in this module for some defaults.

EnvironmentCheckSuite::register('health', 'DatabaseCheck', "Can we connect to the database?");
EnvironmentCheckSuite::register('check', 'URLCheck("")', "Is the homepage accessible?");

Activating Via Config

Register your checks on the EnvironmentCheckSuite. The same named check may be used multiple times.

EnvironmentCheckSuite:
  registered_checks:
    db:
      definition: 'DatabaseCheck("Page")'
      title: 'Is the database accessible?'
    url:
      definition: 'URLCheck()'
      title: 'Is the homepage accessible?'
  registered_suites:
    check:
      - db
    health:
      - db
      - url

You can also disable checks configured this way. This is handy if you want to override a check imposed on your project by some other module. Just set the "state" property of the check to "disabled" like this:

EnvironmentCheckSuite:
  registered_checks:
    db:
      state: disabled

Available checks

• DatabaseCheck: Check that the connection to the database is working, by ensuring that the table exists and that the table contain some records.
• URLCheck: Check that a given URL is functioning, by default, the homepage.
• HasFunctionCheck: Check that the given function exists. This can be used to check that PHP modules or features are installed.
• HasClassCheck: Check that the given class exists. This can be used to check that PHP modules or features are installed.
• FileWriteableCheck: Check that the given file is writeable.
• FileAgeCheck: Checks for the maximum age of one or more files or folders. Useful for files which should be frequently auto-generated, like static caches, as well as for backup files and folders.
• ExternalURLCheck: Checks that one or more URLs are reachable via HTTP.
• SMTPConnectCheck: Checks if the SMTP connection configured through PHP.ini works as expected.
• SolrIndexCheck: Checks if the Solr cores of given class are available.

Monitoring Checks

Checks will return an appropriate HTTP status code, so are easy to hook into common uptime montoring solutions like pingdom.com.

You can also have the environment checker email results with the following configuration:

EnvironmentChecker:
  email_results: true
  to_email_address: support@test.com
  from_email_address: admin@test.com

Errors can be logged via the standard SilverStripe logging. Each check will cause an individual log entry. You can choose to enable logging separately for warnings and errors, identified through the result of EnvironmentCheck->check().

EnvironmentChecker:
  log_results_warning: true
  log_results_error: true

Authentication

By default, accessing the dev/check URL will not require authentication on CLI and dev environments, but if you're trying to access it on a live or test environment, it will respond with a 403 HTTP status unless you're logged in as an administrator on the site.

You may wish to have an automated service check dev/check periodically, but not want to open it up for public access. You can enable basic authentication by defining the following in your environment:

define('ENVCHECK_BASICAUTH_USERNAME', 'test');
define('ENVCHECK_BASICAUTH_PASSWORD', 'password');

Now if you access dev/check in a browser it will pop up a basic auth popup, and if the submitted username and password match the ones defined the username and password defined in the environment, access will be granted to the page.

Adding more checks

To add more checks, you should put additional EnvironmentCheckSuite::register calls into your _config.php. See the _config.php file of this module for examples.

:::php
EnvironmentCheckSuite::register('check', 'HasFunctionCheck("curl_init")', "Does PHP have CURL support?");
EnvironmentCheckSuite::register('check', 'HasFunctionCheck("imagecreatetruecolor")', "Does PHP have GD2 support?");

The first argument is the name of the check suite. There are two built-in check suites, "health", and "check", corresponding to the health/check and dev/check URLs. If you wish, you can create your own check suites and execute them on other URLs. You can also add a check to more than one suite by passing the first argument as an array.

The module comes bundled with a few checks in DefaultHealthChecks.php. However, to test your own application, you probably want to write custom checks.

• Implement the EnvironmentCheck interface
• Define the check() function, which returns a 2 element array:
  • The first element is one of EnvironmentCheck::OK, EnvironmentCheck::WARNING, EnvironmentCheck::ERROR, depending on the status of the check
  • The second element is a string describing the response.

Here is a simple example of how you might create a check to test your own code. In this example, we are checking that an instance of the MyGateway class will return "foo" when call() is called on it. Testing interfaces with 3rd party systems is a common use case for custom environment checks.

:::php
class MyGatewayCheck implements EnvironmentCheck {
	protected $checkTable;

	function check() {
		$g = new MyGateway;
		
		$response = $g->call();
		$expectedResponse = "foo";
		
		if($response == null) {
			return array(EnvironmentCheck::ERROR, "MyGateway didn't return a response");
		} else if($response != $expectedResponse) {
			return array(EnvironmentCheck::WARNING, "MyGateway returned unexpected response $response");
		} else {
			return array(EnvironmentCheck::OK, "");
		}
	}
}

Once you have created your custom check class, don't forget to register it in a check suite

:::php
EnvironmentCheckSuite::register('check', 'MyGatewayCheck', "Can I connect to the gateway?");

Using other environment check suites

If you want to use the same UI as health/check and dev/check, you can create an EnvironmentChecker object. This class is a RequestHandler and so can be returned from an action handler. The first argument to the EnvironmentChecker constructor is the suite name. For example:

class DevHealth extends Controller {
	function index() {
		$e = new EnvironmentChecker('health', 'Site health');
		return $e;
	}
}

If you wish to embed an environment check suite in another, you can use the following call.

$result = EnvironmentCheckSuite::inst("health")->run();

$result will contain a EnvironmentCheckSuiteResult object

• $result->ShouldPass(): Return a boolean of whether or not the tests passed.
• $result->Status(): The string "OK", "WARNING", or "ERROR", depending on the worst failure.
• $result->Details(): A DataObjectSet of details about the result of each check in the suite.

See EnvironmentChecker.ss to see how these can be used to build a UI.

Versioning

This library follows Semver. According to Semver, you will be able to upgrade to any minor or patch version of this library without any breaking changes to the public API. Semver also requires that we clearly define the public API for this library.

All methods, with public visibility, are part of the public API. All other methods are not part of the public API. Where possible, we'll try to keep protected methods backwards-compatible in minor/patch versions, but if you're overriding methods then please test your work before upgrading.

Reporting Issues

Please create an issue for any bugs you've found, or features you're missing.