cPanel Site Checker

This is a handy tool for administrators keeping an eye on managed and semi-managed cPanel hosting servers. It currently does the following:

• Enumerates all accounts and domains on a list of cPanel servers
• Skips any domains that don't resolve in DNS to the that particular server
• Retrieves the text content of the web site and logs it into a file
• Saves a screenshot of the site
• Compare the contents of each web site with its previous snapshot

It will eventually be extended to:

• If a significant difference is encountered, generate an email that contains an alert, as well as the before and after screenshots

Strategies for evaluating differences might include:

• Comparison of first 1KB only
• Percentage difference of entire page
• Scanning for warning/error messages, e.g. PHP notices

In order to make operation of the tool as automatic as possible, I'd prefer not to have to configure the strategy on a per-domain basis - hopefully I'll come up with something that is generic enough to apply to all of the sites I look after.

It's intended to be run periodically from cron, but you may also wish to invoke it after server-wide PHP or Apache upgrades, WordPress core and plugin upgrades, account moves between servers, and so on.

Installation

• Create an API Token in WHM - not entirely sure which permissions are needed yet
• Copy servers.yml.sample to servers.yml file and fill in the blanks

Database Logging

The application logs all check results to a SQLite database in addition to the text file output. This enables future web interface functionality for viewing changes over time.

The database file location can be configured in servers.yml:

:config:
  :database: site_checker.db  # defaults to site_checker.db if not specified

The database contains a check_results table with the following columns:

• timestamp - ISO 8601 timestamp of the check
• host - WHM server hostname
• user - cPanel username
• domain - Domain name
• code - HTTP status code or error message
• location - Final URL after redirects
• digest - SHA256 hash of page content
• txt_status - Text comparison status (different/deleted_duplicate)
• txt_previous_run - Previous run date serial
• screenshot_hash_distance - Perceptual hash distance between screenshots
• screenshot_status - Screenshot comparison status (different/deleted_identical)
• screenshot_previous_run - Previous run date serial for screenshot

Usage

Run the script:

uv run site-checker.py

Or make it executable and run directly:

chmod +x site-checker.py
./site-checker.py