Argus

Argus is a platform for aggregating incidents across network management systems, and sending notifications to users. Users create notification profiles that define which incidents they subscribe to. See Argus docs for more details.

See also the the Python client library.

DEMO

Give Argus a test-run!

See https://argus-demo.uninett.no/.

The demo has notification sending turned off, and automated ticket creation is also turned off. The database is reset every 24 hours. Fake incidents are randomly generated and randomly closed.

Installation

There are several ways to install Argus.

Prerequisites

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• Django 5.2
• pip
• PostgreSQL 14+

Optional requirements

• Docker and Docker Compose to run Argus in Docker. This will also run a PostgreSQL server for you.

Optional: Federated login for frontend

See Federated Login @ Read The Docs or local copy of Federated Login docs.

Install Argus using pip from PyPI

You can install Argus with pip via PyPI. The package name is argus-server:

$ pip install argus-server

If you are using the PyPI wheel package in production, please note: It does not use pinned dependencies. (There is no single official standard for pinned dependencies in Python as of yet.)

Install Argus from source

Download the source code first.

$ git clone https://github.com/Uninett/Argus.git
$ cd Argus

PyPI has sdists of the source if you do not want to use git.

The file requirements.txt contains the pinned versions of dependencies that the release was tested on. The file constraints.txt is for controlling versions of sub-dependencies so as to not poison the pyproject.toml. The wheel package does not contain either of these two files.

To install from the lock-file use pip:

$ pip install -c constraints.txt --upgrade -r requirements.txt

First run

Now change and adapt Argus' settings according to your needs.

Run the initial Argus setup, and make note of the admin password that is generated:

$ python manage.py initial_setup
******************************************************************************

  Created Argus superuser "admin" with password "2S0qJbjVEew0GunL".

   Please change the password via the admin interface.

******************************************************************************

Then run the Argus API server:

$ python manage.py runserver

Update pinned dependencies

To update the dependency lock-files, use tox:

$ pip install "tox>=4"
$ tox run -e upgrade-deps -- -U

To upgrade a single dependency, replace the -U flag with -P PACKAGENAME.

Setup Argus using Docker Compose

Download the source code first.

$ git clone https://github.com/Uninett/Argus.git
$ cd Argus

Running Argus with Docker Compose is as simple as

$ docker compose up

Run the initial Argus setup, and make note of the admin password that is generated:

$ docker compose exec argus django-admin initial_setup
******************************************************************************

  Created Argus superuser "admin" with password "ns6bfoKquW12koIP".

   Please change the password via the admin interface.

******************************************************************************

You will find Argus running at http://localhost:8000/.

Settings in Argus

Site-specific settings can either be set using environment variables, using a settings.py file, or a combination of both.

For more information on both methods and a list of the settings, consult the documentation section on site-specific settings.

Running Argus in development

Step 1: Installation

You can use Docker Compose to conveniently setup a complete dev environment for Argus, including PostgreSQL. Instructions are provided above.

To do a manual install instead, follow these steps.

Download the source code first.

$ git clone https://github.com/Uninett/Argus.git
$ cd Argus

We recommend using virtualenv or virtualenvwrapper to create a place to stash Argus' dependencies.

Create and activate a Python virtual environment.

$ python -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

Install Argus' requirements into the virtual env.

$ pip install -r requirements-django52.txt
$ pip install -r requirements/dev.txt

Step 2: Setting environment variables and Django settings

Copy the cmd.sh-template to cmd.sh and make it executable

$ cp cmd.sh-template cmd.sh
$ chmod u+x cmd.sh

Now set the environment variables in the file using an editor.

Required settings in cmd.sh are

• DATABASE_URL,
• DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE and
• SECRET_KEY.

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE can be set to argus.site.settings.dev.

If you need more complex settings than environment variables and cmd.sh can provide, we recommend having a localsettings.py in the same directory as manage.py with any overrides.

Refer to the development notes for further details and useful hints on managing Argus in development mode.

Settings for the frontend

See https://argus-server.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/htmx-frontend.html.

Step 3: Run Argus in development

Afterwards, run the initial Argus setup and start the server.

$ python manage.py initial_setup
$ python manage.py runserver

You will find Argus running at http://localhost:8000/.

Code style

Argus uses ruff as a Python source code formatter and linter and djLint as an HTML formatter and linter. Ruff and djLint will automatically install with the dev requirements.

A pre-commit hook will format new code automatically before committing. To enable this pre-commit hook, run

$ pre-commit install

Running tests

Given that Argus is installed and configured as described above, this command is the most basic option to run the tests.

$ python manage.py test

If you have installed tox, the following command will test Argus code against several Django versions, several Python versions, and automatically compute code coverage.

$ tox

An HTML coverage report will be generated. Refer to the tox.ini file for further options.

Magical branches

Do not ever remove these

• main
• argus-demo
• stable/SOMETHING

The last branch-type is for backporting bugfixes and similar to older releases, bypassing main if necessary.

How to do maintenance

See MAINTAINING.rst.