Site Pulse — Self-Hosted Website Uptime Monitor

A lightweight, self-hosted uptime monitoring dashboard with live screenshots. Tracks whether your websites are up or down, displays response times, and takes automatic screenshots — all in a mobile-optimized grid you can glance at from across the room.

Built for developers who want a simple, private alternative to services like UptimeRobot or Freshping — running on your own hardware, no subscriptions.

Features

• Uptime monitoring — pings your sites on a configurable interval and flags anything that goes down
• Automatic screenshots — takes a fresh screenshot of each site every hour using headless Chrome
• Color-coded status — green border = up, red border = down, readable at a glance
• Mobile-first grid layout — fits up to 10 sites on one screen, optimized for iPhone SE landscape mode
• One-tap to open — tap any site card to open it in your browser
• Password protected — HTTP basic auth keeps the dashboard private
• Manual refresh — force a fresh check and new screenshots on demand
• Zero cloud dependency — runs entirely on your own machine or server

Requirements

• Node.js v18 or newer
• A machine reachable from your phone (same Wi-Fi, or a VPS with a public IP)

Setup

1. Clone and install

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/site-pulse.git
cd site-pulse
npm install
npx playwright install chromium

2. Configure your sites

cp sites.example.json sites.json

Edit sites.json with the sites you want to monitor:

{
  "refreshSeconds": 1800,
  "timeoutMs": 8000,
  "sites": [
    {
      "name": "My Site",
      "url": "https://example.com",
      "expectStatus": [200, 301, 302]
    }
  ]
}

Field	Description
refreshSeconds	Ping interval in seconds — 1800 = every 30 minutes
timeoutMs	Request timeout in milliseconds
expectStatus	HTTP status codes that count as "up"

3. Set credentials

cp .env.example .env

DASH_USER=your_username
DASH_PASS=your_password
USE_AUTH=true

Set USE_AUTH=false to disable auth on a private network.

4. Run

node server.js

Dashboard runs on port 3010. Open http://localhost:3010 in your browser.

Accessing from your phone

1. Make sure your phone and computer are on the same Wi-Fi
2. Find your local IP: ipconfig (Windows) or ifconfig (Mac/Linux)
3. Open http://YOUR_IP:3010 in Safari
4. Tap Share → Add to Home Screen for a full-screen app experience

How it works

• Pings are lightweight HTTP GET requests — no browser needed, very low overhead
• Screenshots use Playwright (headless Chromium) on a separate hourly schedule
• Screenshots are saved as JPEGs in public/previews/ and served statically
• sites.json and .env are gitignored — your site list and credentials stay local

Stack

• Node.js + Express — server and API
• Playwright — headless Chrome for screenshots
• CSS Grid + Vanilla JS — no framework, loads fast on mobile