Trigger an on demand uptime & broken links check after a deploy

You can use our API to trigger an on demand run of both the uptime check and the broken links checker. If you add this to, say, your deploy script, you can have near-instant validation that your deploy succeeded and didn't break any links & pages.

Find your check IDs

Our API allows you to trigger an on demand run for every check we do. But, it's an API - so it requires a set of IDs. First, let's find the different checks your site has. In order to use this API command, you need 2 things:

1. An API key, which you can generate in your user settings.
2. The site ID, which you can find in the "Settings" menu for every site, all the way at the bottom (in this example, we'll take site ID 7024)

Let's find the different checks that are enabled.

$ curl  https://ohdear.app/api/sites/7024 \
    -H 'Authorization: Bearer [your-api-token-here] ' \
    -H 'Accept: application/json' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' | jq

{
  "id": 7024,
  "url": "https://ohdear.app",
  [...]
  "checks": [
    {
      "id": 32077,
      "type": "uptime",
    },
    {
      "id": 32078,
      "type": "broken_links",
    },
    {
      "id": 32079,
      "type": "mixed_content",
    },
    {
      "id": 32080,
      "type": "certificate_health",
    },
    {
      "id": 32081,
      "type": "certificate_transparency",
    }
  ],
}

Some output was truncated, but you get the idea. There's a bunch of checks, each with their own ID.

Take the check you'd like to run on demand (32077 for the uptime check, 32078 for the broken links check etc.).

Trigger an on demand run with curl

Most deploy scripts allow you to execute some raw commands. In this example, we'll use curl together with your your API key to instruct Oh Dear! to perform a full site check, searching for broken links.

$ curl -X POST https://ohdear.app/api/checks/32077/request-run \
    -H 'Authorization: Bearer [your-api-token-here]' \
    -H 'Accept: application/json' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' | jq
{
  "id": 32077,
  "type": "uptime",
  "label": "Uptime",
  "enabled": true,
  "latest_run_ended_at": "2019-07-10 12:35:40",
  "latest_run_result": "pending"
}

This uses the /request-run endpoint of our API, which you can trigger for every kind of check we have. In this case, we requested a run for the check with ID 32077.

Tying it all together

To combine it all in one easy flow, you can call the following curl commands to instruct Oh Dear! to do a full site check.

#!/bin/bash
API_TOKEN=[your-api-token-here]

UPTIME_ID=32077
BROKENLINKS_ID=32078

# Trigger an uptime check
curl -X POST "https://ohdear.app/api/checks/$UPTIME_ID/request-run" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_TOKEN" \
    -H "Accept: application/json" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json"

# Trigger the broken links check
curl -X POST "https://ohdear.app/api/checks/$BROKENLINKS_ID/request-run" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_TOKEN" \
    -H "Accept: application/json" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json"

Pretty neat, hu?