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Jixun's Blog 填坑还是开坑,这是个好问题。

Create a basic stats service API using C and FastCGI

Preface #

Was thinking about making my own stats page to monitor basic information for all my servers using the Primary back-end and Secondary Workers, where the Primary server will serve the front-end assets while other Worker back-ends provides API exposing the server stats.

This post is about the Secondary Worker written in C using FastCGI, other parts of the system will not be discussed here.

The FastCGI process will be expecting a maximum request rate of 1 request per 10 seconds - the downstream will be responsible to cache the information via Redis.

Deployed primary server can be viewed at stats.jixun.uk.

Environment Setup #

I currently have multiple VPS running on different OS: Alpine Linux, Ubuntu and CentOS 7.

They all have their own package manager and package name conventions, I have wrote a simple script to automate it (which needs to be available):

setup_apt()
{
	apt update
	apt install -y gcc make libfcgi libfcgi-dev spawn-fcgi
}

setup_apk()
{
	apk update
	apk add gcc musl-dev make fcgi fcgi-dev spawn-fcgi
}

setup_yum()
{
	yum -y install gcc make fcgi fcgi-devel spawn-fcgi
}

which apt && setup_apt
which apk && setup_apk
which yum && setup_yum

The Code #

Talk is cheap, show me the code!

FastCGI related information is available on their archived home page, where you can also find a sample code to get started.

The C code emits contents via stdout and not much string variables to escape, the code did not use any third-party library to handle the JSON.

#include "fcgi_stdio.h"

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <inttypes.h>
#include <sys/statvfs.h>

#define JSON_KEY(str) "\"" str "\""
#define IS_DIGIT(c) (c >= '0' && c <= '9')

// Do not use shared_buff if multi-threaded.
char shared_buff[4096];

// CPU INFO

void print_cpu()
{
	printf(JSON_KEY("cpu") ":");
	FILE* f = fopen("/proc/loadavg", "r");
	fread(shared_buff, 1024, 1, f);
	fclose(f);

	char* p = shared_buff;
	while(*p != ' ') p++;
	*p = 0;

	printf("%s", shared_buff);
}

// RAM INFO

// Ram Keyword struct
struct kwd {
	const char* word;
	int len;
};

struct kwd ramKwds[] = {
	{"MemTotal", 8},
	{"MemFree",  7},
	{"Cached",   6},

	{"SwapTotal",  9},
	{"SwapFree",   8},
	{"SwapCached", 10},
};
#define RAM_KWD_N (sizeof(ramKwds)/sizeof(ramKwds[0]))

void print_ram()
{
	printf(JSON_KEY("ram") ":{");
	
	FILE* f = fopen("/proc/meminfo", "r");
	fread(shared_buff, 4096, 1, f);
	fclose(f);

	int wrote = 0;
	char* p = shared_buff;
	while(*p)
	{
		char* line = p;
		while(*p && *p != '\n') p++;
		if (!*p) break;
		*p++ = 0;

		for (int i = 0; i < RAM_KWD_N; i++) {
			if (memcmp(ramKwds[i].word, line, ramKwds[i].len) == 0) {
				if (wrote) putchar(',');

				printf("\"%s\":", ramKwds[i].word);

				// skip past ':' char
				line += ramKwds[i].len + 1;

				// skip whitespace
				while(*line == ' ') {
					line++;
				}
				while(IS_DIGIT(*line)) {
					putchar(*line++);
				}

				wrote = 1;
			}
		}
	}
	putchar('}');
}

char* storages[] = {
	"/"
};
#define STORAGE_COUNT (sizeof(storages)/sizeof(storages[0]))

void print_storage()
{
	printf(JSON_KEY("drives") ":[");

	struct statvfs buf;
	int wrote = 0;
	for (int i = 0; i < STORAGE_COUNT; i++) {
		// see: https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/001d43444944df0bef4e33a1876ba2818c188e11/ext/standard/filestat.c#L251
		if (statvfs(storages[i], &buf)) continue;

		uint64_t block_size  = buf.f_frsize ? buf.f_frsize : buf.f_bsize;
		uint64_t bytes_free  = block_size * buf.f_bavail;
		uint64_t bytes_total = block_size * buf.f_blocks;

		if (wrote) putchar(',');

		printf("{"
			JSON_KEY("mnt")   ":\"%s\","
			JSON_KEY("free")  ":%" PRIu64 ","
			JSON_KEY("total") ":%" PRIu64 "}"
			, storages[i], bytes_free, bytes_total
		);

		wrote = 1;
	}
	putchar(']');
}

int main(void) {
	while (FCGI_Accept() >= 0) {
		printf("Content-type: application/json\r\n");
		printf("\r\n");
		putchar('{');
		print_cpu();
		putchar(',');
		print_ram();
		putchar(',');
		print_storage();
		putchar('}');
    }

    return 0;
}

编译时带上 -lfcgi 即可。我使用的编译语句如下:

gcc main.c -Wall -Wpedantic -std=c11 -lfcgi -O2 -o stats-worker.cgi

To run it… #

Since nginx does not spawn fastcgi process on-demand, spawn-fcgi is required to listen on socket.

Use -n flag to not fork the process, so it can be supervised with systemd or openrc easily.

# run as root and let spawn-fcgi drop privilege later.
spawn-fcgi -n -u www-data -g www-data -f /srv/slave.cgi -s /run/slave.sock -P /run/slave.pid

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