brockman is a lightweight bash utility for reporting on background unix processes.
Installing brockman is easy - just run wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mattjmcnaughton/brockman/master/brockman.sh.
Place the downloaded file in a directory included in your $PATH. Finally, run
chmod u+x on brockman.sh to allow execution.
brockman defines four main options: report, failure,
view, and resolve. These operations handle running a background task
with brockman reporting on errors, whether an error occurred on a task on
which brockman reported, viewing the errors brockman reported,
and resolving errors reported by brockman.
report runs a given command, and monitors whether the operation fails. If
failure, brockman will log both an alert that the task failed, and an
error log of the failure. It logs these errors to
~/.brockman/{alert,error}.log respectively.
Ex: brockman.sh report "clamscan -r ~/"
failure succeeds if brockman has unresolved errors, and fails if not.
Ex: brockman.sh failure
view displays the results of any failures. It outputs either the alert log,
which is a brief description of the command which failed, or the error log,
which is the entire output of stderr for the failed command.
Ex: brockman.sh view [alert|error]
resolve clears out all errors tracked by brockman thus far. You should only
call it after you've copied whatever info you need from brockman logs to a
more permanent location.
Ex: brockman.sh resolve
brockman supports many use cases, following the unix philosophy of performing a single task well.
I use it for monitoring nightly updates, anti-virus scans, and local ansible
playbook runs. I run these cron jobs with brockman.sh report "$CMD" and then
add brockman.sh failure to my ~/.bashrc to alert if one of
these tasks failed when I open a new shell. If there has been a failure,
I use brockman.sh view alert and brockman.sh view error to investigate further.
Finally, after resolving the issue, I run brockman.sh resolve
so brockman won't alert me to this error again.
Contributions are welcome 🐶 Please open an issue or pull request.
Please include tests with any pull requests. The test suite can be run with the following command:
bash test/test_brockman.sh