website-email-alert

Website Email Alert

This Lambda service checks if a URL is available, and if not, sends an e-mail. Kind of like pingdom.

The project demonstrates how to integrate Lambda with AWS Simple E-mail Service.

Prerequisites

If you have never used AWS SES before, you'll need to first verify e-mails that will be used for sending and receiving. Do so from your command line by executing

aws ses verify-email-identity --email-address EMAIL@DOMAIN 

Verifying two e-mail addresses should allow you to see this example in action, but if you want to send e-mails without having to verify every single recipient in the future, you will also need to get out of the SES Sandbox. For more info, check Requesting Production Access to SES.

SES service is specific to a region, so you might want to change the active region in the NPM start script section of package.json.

Try it out

1. run npm install to grab the dependencies
2. run npm start to set up the lambda project under the default name on AWS
3. edit the test.json file and set up the e-mail accounts, as well as the URL you want to check
4. run npm test to execute the function manually using the test event
5. Try it out for some existing or non-existing URLs, to see the effect.
6. Then set it up as a scheduled event on AWS so it runs automatically, by executing npm run schedule. This will run the event from test.json every five minutes.

How it works

Check out the package.json scripts section to see how Claudia gets invoked for the start, test and schedule scripts. You can modify the execution frequency in package.json easily and re-create a different event. See the Schedule Expression Syntax for more information on the syntax.

You can see all scheduled events in the CloudWatch Rules Console, and disable the event there if you don't want to receive any more e-mail notifications.

Check out the main.js file to see how the Lambda function works.