cURL scripts to monitor an API

[jim.fazzone.5i]

Hi Monks!

My Perl-fu is severely lacking, but I was hoping I could turn to all of you to help me with some monitoring I'm trying to get working on a Nagios box. I know how the cURL scripts should look, but I'm having trouble with getting PERL to run these as a monitoring job. Essentially the flow goes like this:

1) POST command calls an SSO service with a user/pass

2) That SSO token then gets inserted into the header of the request of the subsequent URL

3) The API spits back data

Simple enough, right?

My cURL scripts run like so:

curl -v -X POST -d "username=[e-mail]&password=somec
+oolpassword" https://xxxx.xxxxx.com/PathtotheSSOTool

(out spits the token)

curl -v -X GET --header "TOKEN: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.*xxxxxxxx
+xxxxxxxxxxxxx..*" http://url.of.the/api/call

Then, I'd like to be able to capture whatever the browser would spit back into a .log file. If it has stuff in it, great! If it returns with ERROR, we want it to alarm.

Easy enough, but I'm totally stuck on how to get started here. Any thoughts?

[Corion]

Depending on how close you want to stay to cURL, look either at LWP::UserAgent or at cURL.

Using LWP::UserAgent together with HTTP::Request::Common should be fairly easy to send the messages:

my $ua= LWP::UserAgent->new();
my $res= $ua->post( $url, { username => '[e-mail]', 
+password => 'somecoolpassword' });
$res->dump;