Awesome server status message

September 11, 2019 • 3 min read • Ruby

Many developers tend to overlook the importance of server status and error messages, such as "404 Page Not Found," until they become critical. Recently, while working on a project where I managed the server-side operations, I encountered a significant issue with our Rails API backend.

In our staging environment, we experienced frequent server downtimes due to the high volume of data being fetched from a third-party service. The server's capacity was inadequate to handle such loads, leading to performance bottlenecks. Whenever I noticed delayed responses, I would manually check the server status to confirm if it was operational. In cases where the server wasn’t down, I often ended up with JSON responses that didn’t provide much clarity about the underlying issues.

{"success":true,"message":"Amyal backend server is up","version":null,"env":"development"}

To enhance my experience, I decided to replace the typical JSON response with a beautifully rendered HTML page that would cheer me up whenever the server was operational.

Since my application was entirely built as a Rails API, this required a bit of creativity. I created a new controller that inherits from ActionController::Base. This allowed me to serve HTML responses in addition to the JSON responses typically returned by the API. This new setup provided a much more pleasant and informative way to check the server's status.

class PagesController < ActionController::Base; end

and the rest of the controllers will inherit from ActionController::API

class ApplicationController < ActionController::API; end

app/controllers/pages_controller.rb

# frozen_string_literal: true
class PagesController < ActionController::Base
# This will return not founded router page
rescue_from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound do
  render :not_found
end
# Our server status action
def status
  @build_revision = build_revision
  render :status
end

private

  # REVISION is a file generated in current folder in server by Capistrano
  # which show the commit id of the current version of the application in current folder

  def build_revision
    return unless File.file?('REVISION')
    file = File.open('REVISION', 'r')
    data = file.read
    file.close
    data
  end
end

and we added some HTML and CSS code in our view app/views/pages/status.html.erb

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Server Staus</title>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <style>
    body { text-align: center; padding: 150px; }
    h1 { font-size: 50px; }
    body { font: 20px Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #333; }
    article { display: block; text-align: left; width: 1050px; margin: 0 auto; }
    a { color: #dc8100; text-decoration: none; }
    a:hover { color: #333; text-decoration: none; }
    table { border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; }
    th, td { text-align: left; padding: 8px; }
    tr:nth-child(even) {background-color: #f2f2f2;}
    th { background-color: #4CAF50; color: white; }
  </style>
  </head>
<body>
<article>
  <h1 style="color:Tomato;"><%=Rails.env.capitalize%> Server</h1>
<div>
  <p style="color:DodgerBlue;">Amyal backend server is running, Enjoy with our api&rsquo;s!</p>
  <div style="overflow-x:auto;">
<table>
  <tr>
  <th>Status</th>
  <th>Environment</th>
  <th>Message</th>
  <th>Version</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>Running</td>
  <td><%=Rails.env.capitalize%></td>
  <td>Amyal backend server is up</td>
  <td><%=@build_revision%></td>
  </tr>
</table>
</div>
  <p style="color:MediumSeaGreen;">&mdash; Best regards: Back-end Team</p>
</div>
</article>
</body>
</html>

Now check localhost:3000 to see the result