From sign-up to a watched app in ten minutes.

Requirements

What each area needs

Install the agent

1. Sign in at app.basepit.com, open Hosts and choose Enrol a host.
2. Name the host. The console shows a line with a token in it. The token works once, expires in an hour, and is shown only this once.
3. Paste the line into the machine as a user with sudo:

A successful run looks like this. The four checks at the top run before anything is written:

basepit installer

  ✓ root                    uid 0
  ✓ platform                linux / arm64 · Ubuntu 24.04 · systemd 255
  ✓ controller reachable    https://app.basepit.com  (42 ms)
  ✓ agent 1.4.0             15.8 MB · sha256 verified

  → enrolling as web-03
  → installing /usr/local/bin/basepit-agent
  → writing /etc/basepit/agent.env
  → installing basepit-agent.service
  → starting

  ✓ web-03 is online        connected in 2.1 s

  Logs       journalctl -u basepit-agent -f
  Uninstall  sudo sh /etc/basepit/uninstall-agent.sh

The figures above are an example. The is online line is printed only once the machine has actually connected, and at the same moment the host turns green in the console.

Install flags

Many machines at once

For machines you create with automation, make an enrol key in Hosts. One key enrols many machines, and each joins as a host named by its own hostname. The console gives you ready-to-use snippets for cloud-init, Ansible and Terraform. The cloud-init one looks like this:

#cloud-config
# BasePit: this machine joins BasePit at its first boot.
# Each machine needs its own hostname: it becomes the machine's name in BasePit.
# Revoke the enrol key in BasePit once your machines have joined: cloud-init keeps a copy of this file.
hostname: web-01
write_files:
  - path: /root/.basepit-key
    permissions: '0600'
    content: 'PASTE-YOUR-ENROL-KEY'
runcmd:
  - [sh, -c, 'curl -fsSL https://app.basepit.com/install.sh | sh -s -- --token-file /root/.basepit-key']

The key goes through a file, never on a command line. Revoke the key once your machines have joined. For cloud machines that BasePit makes for you in your own account, there is nothing to paste at all.

Your first ten minutes

1. Create your account. Choose Just me or An organisation, and confirm your email. You can also sign in with Google or Slack. No card is asked for: every month the account gets 70 free credits, one server and twenty monitors, and it starts with 300 more. Pricing.
2. Enrol a host with the line above, and watch it turn green.
3. New app. Pick what you are deploying: a container image, a command you already run, a file (a JAR or a saved image), a script on the host, or a compose file. Or start from the catalogue. Choose where it runs, set it up, and read the last step: it shows exactly what will happen, including the command BasePit will run. Nothing runs until that step.
4. New monitor. Say what to watch, from where, how often, and who should know when it goes down. The last step runs the first check in front of you.
5. Add a channel under Alerts, so a page has somewhere to go. Slack, through an incoming webhook, is the usual first.
6. Invite your team from People & access (in an organisation), and give each person a role: Viewer, Operator or Admin.

A job that checks in

For a backup or any cron job, create a heartbeat monitor. Its last step shows a token once, in full, inside the line to add to the job:

# one crontab line
0 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://app.basepit.com/h/<TOKEN>

BasePit expects the call on the schedule you set, allows a grace period, and then marks the job late, then down. The job can also report /start and /fail. If a token is ever exposed, Regenerate makes a new one and the old one stops working at once.

Upgrade and uninstall

• Upgrade from the console, for one host or every out-of-date one. If the new agent does not connect, the old one is put back by itself. Running the install line again without a token also upgrades, and changes nothing else.
• Uninstall with the script the installer left on the machine. It needs no network:

sudo sh /etc/basepit/uninstall-agent.sh     # the agent
sudo sh /etc/basepit/uninstall.sh           # every BasePit program on this machine

It removes the machine's secret with the rest. Then revoke the host in the console, so its record is sent nothing.

If something goes wrong

• "Nothing was installed" means exactly that: a check failed before anything was written. The line above it says which check, and how to fix it.
• A token refused as not valid on a second run usually means the first run already worked: tokens work once. Look for the host in the console.
• Not sure what it will do? Add --dry-run to print every step without writing anything.
• The agent's own log is in the journal: journalctl -u basepit-agent -f.