Über fast, backwards compatible (IE8+), tiny, and simple status page built with Hugo. Completely free with Netlify. Comes with Netlify CMS, read-only API, and other useful features.

Sponsored by

You can also support the creator of this project by starring, sharing, using cState and/or financially supporting the author. Thank you!

Examples 🥳

Official

• Example site — cstate.mnts.lt
• Source code of the example cState site

Thank you to Netlify for hosting our demo websites!

More examples from the internet

• Chocolatey
• tmw.media
• Proventa (German)
• sr.ht
• Content Ignite
• FSCI
• Storehouse
• Hyrousek
• josh.win

Want your status page here? Create a PR!

Contents 🔍

• Sponsors
• Examples
• Features
• Getting started
• Updating
• FAQ
• Contribute
• License

Features 😎

Purpose / how it works

You can think of the cState status page as an informational hub. Because the software is static, it cannot directly monitor any services in real time.

However, cState is a perfect option for recording incidents because most of the time your services are functioning, so the status page does not need to be updated. By default, the little bit of JavaScript on the page improves the user experience but is not required to see the most vital information.

There are other commercial options that may update faster because of their architecture, have built-in real-time uptime monitoring, send notifications by email or other means, but cState is not supposed to be better than paid solutions, but good enough.

List of possibilities

Please note that with all that cState can do, it cannot do automatic monitoring. See this thread

cState is designed with care	Fast, reliable, and free (even with host)	Easy to setup, manage, use
A simple and focused user interface & experience with instant loading, suitable for any brand	Built with Hugo, a hyperfast Golang static site generator (SSG)	As easy as WordPress: if you don't like getting into the code, try Netlify CMS
cState switches to dark mode automatically, if told so by your OS and browser settings	Use the full power of Hugo — flavored Markdown, shortcodes, templates, and more	Most of the settings are in the config.yml file or under Settings in Netlify CMS
Statistical calculations show the key take-away (e.g., time spent fixing an issue)	Airtight back-end security because cState is built on the JAMstack	Create systems, categories for recording incidents (or even informational posts and pages)
Great for data manipulation and viewing — cState has RSS, tag-like system feeds	HTTPS, domain linking, easy setup & high performance with Netlify & Netlify CMS — absolutely free	Built-in language files/translations for English, German, French, Turkish, and Lithuanian
Easy linking to 3rd parties, customizable views, colors, HTML, and assets	You can also use many of the advanced features on platforms such as GitLab Pages & others that support Hugo	Extensive documentation on the wiki
Very little JavaScript. Responsive CSS that is backwards compatible up to Internet Explorer 8	Create your own workflow — cState generates static files that can be hosted literally anywhere (CDN, AWS, GitHub Pages)	Feel free to create an issue if you have any questions or feedback
Badges for showing the status on other websites (similiar to shields.io)	Read-only API available for even further integration	cState is always improving and the user community is only growing — you're with good company

Getting started 💻

This is how you create a new site powered by cState. What you are generating is a Hugo site with specific, already existing modifications (to Hugo, cState is a theme).

💚 Netlify and Netlify CMS

cState was built to work best with Netlify and comes with the neccesary files to enable Netlify CMS.

You don't have to use Netlify, but this is the best all-around option:

• To get you started, Netlify is completely free (you can pay for extra features, bandwidth, etc)
• It supports all the features you'd want for hosting a modern website: HTTPS, domain linking, worldwide asset serving, rollbacks, and more
• As you'd expect, Netlify CMS works best with Netlify. It takss just a few clicks to make it work

You can simply click this button to get started:

This sets up cState with its default settings from the the example repository repo.

If you cloned the example repository and want to use that newly forked repo, click the 'New site from Git' button in the user dashboard.

These are the settings you should be using:

• Build command: hugo
• Publish directory: public
• Add one build environment variable
  • Key: HUGO_VERSION
  • Value: 0.80 (or later)
• Also for the Build image selection, pick Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 or later

🧡 Other great hosting and CMS options

The most popular options, apart from Netlify's offers, are:

• Hosting:
  • GitHub Pages
  • GitLab Pages
  • Cloudflare Pages
  • Vercel
• Admin panels / CMS:
  • Forestry.io
  • Or just use your Git provider (github.com, gitlab.com, etc)

You can also look at other headless CMS options (we use Git-based CMS types) on jamstack.org.

GitLab Pages

Here is a good guide for getting started with the service.

In short: a .gitlab-ci.yml file is responsible for making cState work. As of v4.2.1, the cState automatically ships with this file, but support is still experimental.

As of this time, this is a relatively untested option, but Hugo does seem to generate the right things (this can be checked by downloading the CI/CD artificats).

According to GitLab, it may take up to 30 minutes before the site is available after the first deployment.

You can make Netlify CMS work on GitLab, but that requires overriding an existing file in the theme. Create a file in static/admin/config.yml and follow the instructions linked earlier. (cState by default ships with Git Gateway for Netlify.)

GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Forestry, and others

There is no official, separate documentation for these, but if you look below to see how to deploy manually, the instructions will be the same everywhere.

Doing it on your PC

Keep reading to see how to deploy manually. Developers wishing to contribute, scroll to the very bottom.

Manual builds

For this tutorial, it is assumed that you have Hugo and Git installed (check with hugo version & git --version).

A minimum version of 0.80 is required for Hugo, starting with v5.

I want to use my site in production

Clone the example repository:

git clone --recursive -b master https://github.com/cstate/example.git

(We are using --recursive because the site will not generate with an empty themes/cstate folder.)

Now you can edit what's inside the folder (example) and try previewing that with this command:

hugo serve

Once the changes you wanted done are finished, generate the final files like this:

hugo

And the folder public can now be hosted.

The downside with manual building is that, if you do not want to use a solution like GitLab Pages or Netlify, this process will need to happen on your computer. This can be tedious.

Docker

cState comes with a Dockerfile and Netlify (according to their article from 2016) uses a similar Docker system to build cState. This is an option for people who prefer Docker and NGINX instead of serverless, but serverless still has the priority in our development.

Read wiki

Updating 🎉

If you are updating from one major version to another, like from v3 to v4, then please read the migration guides.

Assuming the production install instructions were followed, keep cState updated by having an up to date Git submodule in the themes folder. containing this repository. Your content should stay separate from the guts of cState.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do I already have the up to date Git repository with my status page on my computer?

• If not, go to your desktop or somewhere else, where you can download your Git repository and run: git clone --recursive <your repo link goes here> && git submodule foreach git pull origin master.
• In the parent directory, type hugo serve. Check to see if everything is working.
• Then do git add -A; git commit -m "Update cState"; git push origin master; exit. Your status page is now updated.

2. If you DO have the directory, go inside themes/cstate. If that is empty, it is easier to delete your local copy and do the steps outlined earlier.

There is currently no easier way to do this, unfortunately, you will need the terminal / command line / Git Bash, unless you want to create a new status page from scratch and move your data over manually.

More info about submodules: updating & cloning.

FAQ 🤔

What should be the first thing I do after downloading the example repository? What do I edit?

Most of the settings are in the config.yml file or under Settings, if you have set up Netlify CMS.

How do I create issues?

Using an admin panel (Netlify CMS)

This takes a little more effort to set up but pays off in the long run — see the wiki for up to date information.

Doing it from the Git repository

Create a file in content/issues. The name of the file will be the slug (what shows up in the URL bar). For example, this is what 2017-02-30-major-outage-east-us.md should look like:

---
title: Major outage in East US
date: 2017-02-30 14:30:00
resolved: true
resolvedWhen: 2017-02-30 16:00:00
severity: down
affected:
  - API
section: issue
---

*Monitoring* - After hitting the ole reboot button Example Chat App is now recovering. We’re going to continue to monitor as everyone reconnects. {{< track "2018-04-13 16:50:00" >}}

*Investigating* - We’re aware of users experiencing unavailable guilds and issues when attempting to connect. We're currently investigating. {{< track "2018-04-13 15:54:00" >}}

This is what you would see for an issue that has been resolved.

Time to break that down.

title: This is the one of the most important parts of an incident. (required)
date: An ISO-8601 formatted date. Does not include time zone. This is when you first discovered the issue. (required)
resolved: Whether issue should affect overall status. Either true or false. (boolean, required)
resolvedWhen: An ISO-8601 formatted date. Does not include time zone. This is when downtime stopped. You may set the time that downtime ended without completely resolving the issue (thus leaving time for monitoring).
severity: If an issue is not resolved, it will have an applied severity. There are 3 levels of severity: notice, disrupted, and down. If there are multiple issues, the status page will take the appearance of the more drastic issue (such as disrupted instead of notice). (required)
affected. Add the items that were present in the config file which should alter the status of each individual system (component). (array, required)
section. This must be issue, so that Hugo treats it as one. (required)

You don't have to define a date for resolvedWhen when the issue is not resolved (obviously):

---
title: Major outage in East US
date: 2017-02-30 14:30:00
resolved: false
severity: down
affected:
  - API
section: issue
---

We are looking into this...

Is that it?

For this very basic tutorial, yes.

I have more questions!

Check out the wiki.

Contribute 💥

Making a change in the code

PRs should be submitted to the dev branch, if it exists. Before submitting a pull request, create an issue to discuss the implications of your proposal.

Here is a guide for how you should develop:

1. Clone this repository in the command line:

git clone --recursive -b master https://github.com/cstate/cstate.git

2. Navigate to the theme directory:

cd cstate/exampleSite

3. Launch the development setup like this:

hugo serve --baseUrl=http://localhost/ --theme=cstate --themesDir=../.. --verbose

The main directory is the theme itself (the cState guts, basically) and the exampleSite folder houses all content. Use this local setup to experiment before making a PR.

For translators

See this.

Code of conduct

Be kind.

License ✍

MIT © Mantas Vilčinskas

A special thanks to all the contributors

Note about versions

We use semantic versioning. Version numbers are logged in the console (JS partial), the HTML — the meta[generator] tag (meta partial), and API index (index.json).