discord-disk-usage-report

Pretty-printed disk usage reports, posted by cron to a Discord channel via webhook (curl).

When configured as described below, this script will regularly post messages to Discord that look like the following:

Dependencies

• bash
• awk
• curl
• python (any old version, just for JSON escaping)
• cron, or something like cron, to make it act like a "service".

Setup

1. Clone this repo on a server somewhere.
2. Edit the top of the disk-usage-report script so the webhook_url variable contains your real Discord Webhook URL.
3. Give the script a test run! You can just type ./disk-usage-report at the command line.
4. If your message showed up in Discord, you're almost done. I have written a quick setup script to set up cron for hourly disk usage reports, using cron.hourly. You can use it just by running ./setup from the root of this repo, once, any time (before or after you make changes to the script, because it is a symbolic link, not a file copy).

• If you used the setup script, move on to step 5. If you want to set it up yourself instead, you will first have to set up the ProgressBar submodule:

  cd ProgressBar
  git submodule init
  git submodule update
  cd ..

  Then, there are a number of ways you can automate the webhook, but the simplest is to just use cron. You have two options for adding a cron job:

  • You can configure any custom timing you like with sudo crontab -e, which requires you to read the manual a little bit...

  • ...or if you just want the webhook to be called hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly (etc), if your system is running a new enough version of cron, you can just symbolically link your script into /etc/cron.daily/ or /etc/cron.hourly/, etc, if they are present on your system:

  sudo ln -s /path/to/discord-disk-usage-report/disk-usage-report /etc/cron.hourly/

  This is what my setup script does. This will schedule an hourly disk usage report to be posted to your Discord channel! 🎉

5. You can test it with sudo su followed by run-parts /etc/cron.hourly, but beware that that will run EVERYTHING in cron.hourly. Note also that simply calling it with sudo run-parts will not change to the root user like cron does, so it's not a true test (just in case). Alternatively, you can just wait an hour/day for cron to test it for you.

6. Optionally, you can edit the TZ= portion of the disk-usage-report script to change the timezone of the timestamp variable, or edit the area between the two EOMs to change the exact message being posted. Have fun, and let me know if you do anything cool with it!

Next Steps for this repo

I would really like to make this script not repeat itself, if the disk usage hasn't changed in the last hour. So there isn't a bunch of activity in that discord channel when things are not being downloaded / moved around.

About the send-message script

Note: This repo is a fork of my mturley/curl-discord-cronjob repo, with the disk-usage-report script replacing the example script found there. See the README over there for more details on how the send-message script works.