Getting started

Hora is a single self-contained binary: migrations and templates are compiled in, history lives in one SQLite file. The fastest path is the Docker image - a static musl binary on Alpine, about 15 MB.

Quick start (Docker)

mkdir -p hora-config && cp config.example.toml hora-config/config.toml
# edit hora-config/config.toml

docker run -d --name hora --restart unless-stopped \
  -p 8787:8787 \
  -v "$PWD/hora-config:/etc/hora" \
  -v hora-data:/data \
  ghcr.io/uplg/hora:latest

The status page is at http://localhost:8787/. Put it behind your reverse proxy on whatever domain you like - Hora is self-contained and assumes nothing about who consumes it.

Your history lives on the hora-data volume and survives upgrades.

A first config

[page]
title = "My services"

[server]
bind = "0.0.0.0:8787"
database_path = "/data/hora.db"

[alerts]
fail_threshold = 3        # consecutive failures before "down" - kills flapping
cert_expiry_days = 14     # warn before a TLS certificate expires

[[channels]]
name = "ops"
type = "telegram"
token = "${HORA_TELEGRAM_TOKEN}"
chat_id = "123456"

[[monitors]]
id = "website"
name = "Website"
target = "https://example.com"
interval_secs = 60
timeout_secs = 10

Any ${VAR} in the file is replaced from the environment at load, so secrets stay out of the config: pass -e HORA_TELEGRAM_TOKEN=123:abc to the container. Validate with hora check (non-zero exit on error, CI-friendly), and verify your notification chain with hora test-alert before the first real incident.

ICMP monitors in Docker

kind = "icmp" monitors use an unprivileged datagram socket, so they need no extra capability as long as the container’s group id is within the kernel’s net.ipv4.ping_group_range - Docker’s default (0 2147483647) already covers the image’s 10001 user, including rootless Docker. If your host narrows that range, either widen it (--sysctl net.ipv4.ping_group_range="0 2147483647") or grant --cap-add NET_RAW; otherwise icmp monitors simply report down with a clear reason.

From source

git clone https://github.com/uplg/hora && cd hora
cp config.example.toml config.toml   # then edit
cargo run -p hora

Building requires a C toolchain and cmake (for aws-lc-rs, the rustls crypto provider). The quality gate is make gate (fmt, clippy, cargo-deny, cargo-audit, tests) - the exact checks CI runs.

Environment variables

Only three are read directly (everything else lives in the config file):

Variable	Meaning
HORA_CONFIG	Path to the config file (default ./config.toml)
HORA_DATABASE_PATH	Overrides server.database_path
HORA_BIND	Overrides server.bind
HORA_EXEC_DIR	Enables exec probes and confines them to this directory

Plus HORA_LOG for log filtering (a tracing filter string, default info).

Next steps

• Configuration - live reload, secrets, validation.
• Monitors - every probe kind and its options.
• Alerting & notifications - channels, routing, silences and maintenance windows.