Uptime Kuma and Claude
While talking to a colleague of mine he had mentioned something called Uptime Kuma, which is an open source alternative to Uptime Robot. This was interesting for me because I have Uptime Robot checking a couple of my websites and I thought, "Hey, maybe I can use Uptime Kuma as a replacement for Uptime Robot."
I dove into the docs a bit and discovered that there was a Docker image for it, which was nice.
I then used Claude to take the docker run command
docker run -d \
--restart=always \
-p 3001:3001 \
-v uptime-kuma:/app/data \
--name uptime-kuma louislam/uptime-kuma:1
and turn it into a compose file, which gave me this
version: '3'
services:
uptime-kuma:
image: louislam/uptime-kuma:1
container_name: uptime-kuma
restart: always
ports:
- "3001:3001"
volumes:
- uptime-kuma:/app/data
volumes:
uptime-kuma:
Next, I took the output of that compose file and asked Claude to also generate a caddy configuration for me and it gave me this
monitor.yourdomain.com {
# Enable compression
encode gzip zstd
# Add security headers
header {
# Enable HSTS
Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload"
# Prevent content-type sniffing
X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff"
# Referrer policy
Referrer-Policy "strict-origin-when-cross-origin"
}
# Reverse proxy to Uptime Kuma
reverse_proxy localhost:3001
}
I then SSH'd into one of my servers using Shellfish 1.
I updated the docker-compose.yml file and my Caddyfile to include what Claude had output.
I restarted my docker containers and didn't get my new container running.
So I took the whole Docker Compose file from my server and I put that into Claude and said,
Hey, is there anything wrong with my Docker Compose file?
It indicated that there were some issues and provided updates for. I made those changes and did the same thing with the Caddyfile. Again, Claude offered up some changes. I applied the recommended changes for the docker-compose.yml file and the Caddyfile stopped and started my docker containers.
I suddenly had an instance of Uptime Kuma. All in all, it took about a half hour from start to finish while I was watching a hockey game ... from my iPad.
I didn't really have to do anything other than a couple of tweaks here and there on the Docker Compose file and a couple of tweaks here and there on the Caddyfile. and I suddenly have this tool that allows me to monitor the uptime of various websites that I'm interested in.
As I wrapped up it hit me ... holy crap, this is an amazing time to live2. You have an idea, Claude (or whatever AI tool you want to use) outputs a thing, and then you're up and running. This really reduces that barrier to entry to just try new things.
Is the Docker Compose file the most performant? I don't know. Is the Caddyfile the most secured lockdown thing? I don't know.
But for these small projects that are just me, I don't know how much it really matters.