Portfolio Process Pinger

A C++ application that sends process status information to my website for the "Apps running on my machine" section.

Installation

Build the project with CMake.

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<path_to_vcpkg_installation>/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake

Then, follow up with these commands:

• install: Registers the systemd service
• uninstall: Completely uninstalls the service from the machine
• run: Internally used by systemd to run the service

sudo ./portfolio_pinger install

Configuration

By default, the program expects the configuration to live in /etc/${SERVICE_NAME}/pinger.config.json. Create the folder using mkdir /etc/${SERVICE_NAME}/. Create the pinger.config.json in home and generate a symlink to /etc/${SERVICE_NAME}/pinger.config.json to easily change configuration from the home directory. For the default SERVICE_NAME portfolio-process-monitor:

mkdir /etc/portfolio-process-monitor/
cd ~ && touch pinger.config.json
ln -s ~/pinger.config.json /etc/portfolio-process-monitor/pinger.config.json 

Changing service name or configuration directory

You can change the service name or configuration directory during build in CMakeLists.txt file.

add_definitions(-DENV_SERVICE_NAME="your-service-name")
add_definitions(-DCONFIGURATION_HOME_DIRECTORY="/path/to/config")

Example configuration

{
  "authorization_secret": "secret123",
  "target_url": "<your-url-endpoint>",
  "ping_interval": 1000,
  "process_targets": [
    {
      "app_name": "Chrome",
      "process_name": "chrome"
    },
    {
      "app_name": "Android Studio",
      "process_name": "studio"
    },
    {
      "app_name": "Postman",
      "process_name": "postman"
    },
    {
      "app_name": "Visual Studio IDE",
      "process_name": "visual_studio"
    },
    {
      "app_name": "Visual Studio Code",
      "process_name": "code"
    }
  ]
}

How It Works: Deprecated

The application monitors specified processes on my local machine and sends heartbeat signals to my portfolio website every 2 seconds. The implementation follows these steps:

• Reads a list of processes to monitor from ~/.pinger.config.json by default
• For each process, checks if it's currently running
• Only boolean status (running/not running) is tracked
• Creates a JSON payload containing process statuses
• Generates an HMAC hash of the process statuses using a shared private key
• Adds the hash as a header in the payload
• Sends HTTP POST requests to the Vercel endpoint
• Includes the HMAC signature in request payload
• Maintains a 2-second heartbeat interval between requests