Getting started

To use Upptime as an uptime monitor and status website generator, you start by creating a repository using the template on GitHub.

Create a repository from the template

You can click on the following link to generate a repository using the template: Create a new repository from upptime/upptime, make sure that you include all branches. Alternatively, you can visit the Upptime repository on GitHub and click on the "Use this template" button on the top-right.

In both cases, the next steps are:

  1. Enter a name for your new repository.
  2. Important: Check "Include all branches".
  3. Click on "Create repository from template".

For more details on how to create repositories using template, read the article on the GitHub website: Creating a repository from a template.

Billing note: Upptime uses thousands of build minutes every month (approximately 3,000 minutes in the default setting). If you use a public repository, GitHub offers unlimited free build minutes, but if you use a private repository, you'll have to pay for this time.

After creating your repository

The following steps apply to your new repository, not the upptime/upptime template repository.

Enable workflows

To be able to see and run all the workflows that come with the upptime repo your first step must be to open the Actions tab on your fork. There you will find a dialog and a button that will allow you to enable the workflows that come with upptime.

Enable publishing

To get a static status website, you have to enable GitHub Pages on your new repository.
Usually, GitHub will enable GitHub Pages as soon as a gh-pages branch is detected. If this doesn't happen should you do the following steps.

  1. Go to your repository settings page
  2. Go to the "Pages" sub-section on the left
  3. Under "Source", change "None" to "Deploy from a branch"
  4. In the Branch dropdown, select gh-pages and /(root)
  5. Click on "Save"

After saving, you will see confirmation text "Your site is live at..." at the top of the page. For more information on enabling GitHub Pages, see the article on the GitHub website: Configuring a publishing source for your GitHub Pages site.

If you don't want to have a publicly-available status website, you don't have to enable publishing. If that is the case, you can also choose to keep your repository private. It is not possible to publish a status website from a private repository without using an API proxy with authentication. See #54 and the Configuration for apiBaseUrl to learn how to set up a status website from your private repository.

Add repository secrets

All sensitive information required, such as API keys, are provided as environment variables. These are stored as GitHub repository secrets (see Creating and storing encrypted secrets).

To make commits and publish your website, Upptime requires a personal access token (PAT) with read-write permissions of Actions, Contents, Issues and Workflows, stored as a repository secret named GH_PAT. You can create a personal access token by following these steps:

  1. Click on your profile picture on the top-right corner and select "Settings"
  2. In the left sidebar, select "Developer settings"
  3. In the left sidebar, click "Personal access tokens" > "Fine-grained tokens"
  4. Click "Generate new token"
  5. Give your token a specific distinct name
  6. In the "Expiration" dropdown, select "90 days" or a custom, longer expiry
  7. In the "Resource Owner" section select the user or organization your Upptime repository belongs to
  8. In the "Repository Access" section select "Only select repositories" and select your Upptime repository
  9. In the "Permissions" > "Repository permissions" section enable read-write access to Actions, Contents, Issues and Workflows
  10. Skip the "Organization permissions" section
  11. Click "Generate token" or "Generate token and request access" (if it is in an org you are not an admin of)

After generating your token, copy it (you will not see it again). Then, add it as a repository secret:

  1. In your Upptime repository, select "Settings"
  2. In the left sidebar, click "Secrets and variables" followed by "Actions"
  3. Press the button "New repository secret"
  4. Enter the name of the secret as GH_PAT
  5. Paste your personal access token into the Value field
  6. Be sure there are no spaces before or after the token and/or linebreaks after your token
  7. Save your PAT by selecting "Add secret"

For more information on PATs, read article on the GitHub website: Creating a personal access token.

Update configuration

The .upptimerc.yml file is used as the central configuration store. In that file, you can specify which endpoints you want to monitor and configure your status website. For more information, visit Configuration.

You can start by setting the owner and repo, and adding your endpoints under sites:

.upptimerc.yml
owner: koj-co # GitHub username
repo: upptime # GitHub repository name
sites: # List of endpoints to track
- name: Google
url: https://www.google.com
assignees: # Users to assign downtime issues (optional)
- AnandChowdhary
status-website: # Status website (optional)
cname: upptime.js.org # Custom domain CNAME
name: Upptime # Status website title

If you're not using a custom domain, you can remove the line starting with cname: and instead add the GitHub repository name using the baseUrl: setting:

status-website:
baseUrl: /repo # where "repo" is your repository name
name: Your Status Website

Then, your status page may be hosted on https://user.github.io/repo/, where user is your GitHub username and repo is your repository name.

Viewing GitHub Actions workflows

After updating the configuration file, Upptime should run workflows using GitHub Actions to update your README.md and generate API endpoints and graphs. To view the status, click on the "Actions" tab in your repository. You should see pending or complete workflows. If you don't, you can manually trigger the "Setup CI" using the Triggers article.

If you've forked the Upptime repository or have rules to disable Actions by default, you'll have to manually enable GitHub Actions, but this should probably not be your case.

Best practices

Now that you have your Upptime instance fully set up, you should follow these best practices when adding details to outage incidents.

  • Upptime will automatically open a new issue when an outage occurs
  • If you haven't identified the cause of this outage, you can add a comment like: "Investigating: We're currently investigating the cause of this outage, and we'll update the details here shortly."
  • Then, you can add some comments with the details of the outage, and change the name of the issue with the details of the outage
  • The issue will be automatically closed when the site comes back up, so you can add a last comment with a postmortem of the outage
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