disk-usage-warn/README.md

Mike’s Disk Usage Warn Thing

This is a simple script that will emit a warning to stderr when your disk usage surpasses a configured threshold. StdErr output was chosen for its simplicity, and because it’s very easy to configure a cron job to send you an email any time an error occurs.

Requirements

• Python3

• Python pyaml module

  Example:

  sudo pip3 install pyaml

• logger program, which should be on most distributions

Installation

1. First, make sure you have python3 and pip3 installed

2. Use pip3 to make sure you have the python module “pyaml” installed

3. Create a configuration file somewhere.

4. Create a Crontab entry that will call this script with an argument “--config” followed by the path to your configuration file.

(examples found below)

Command Line Arguments

This script needs command line arguments to work. Primarily, it needs to know the location of at least one valid configuration file

--config < path >

Specifies a path to a configuration file or directory. If a directory is specified, it will be scanned for configuration files.

Example Call With Arguments

Assuming you can invoke Python 3 with the command python3, here’s a quick example using two configuration files:

python3 /path/to/disk-usage-warn --config "/my/config/path-1" --config "/my/config/path-2"

Example Crontab Entry

As mentioned, the easiest way to use this script is with Crontabs. By default, cron jobs will send you an email any time a script outputs to stdout or stderr. Since this script will output lots of information onto stdout, and only output to stderr when a disk has become full, it’s useful to redirect stdout to /dev/null, like so:

python3 /path/to/disk-usage-warn --config "/path-to-config" > /dev/null

So, in order to run this script every 5 minutes, use something like the following:

*/5 * * * * python3 /path/to/disk-usage-warn --config "/path-to-config" > /dev/null

The examples above assume you can invoke Python 3 with the command python3.