A script to check GitHub's status.

gh_script.rb

require 'json'
require 'net/http'

status = nil
until status == 'good'
  url = URI('https://status.github.com/api/status.json')
  response = Net::HTTP.get(url)
  body = JSON.parse(response)
  p body
  status = body['status']
  sleep 5
end
puts 'GitHub has recovered!'

gh_script_full.rb

require 'json'
require 'net/http'

# initialize the status with some harmless value. this lets us check the value the first time without getting an error.
status = nil

# until we modify the `status` variable to equal 'good' (the options are 'good', 'minor' or 'major')
until status == 'good'

  # the Net::HTTP get method demands an URI object, that gets initialized by the full URL string
  url = URI('https://status.github.com/api/status.json')

  # this actually goes and gets the information from the github servers.
  response = Net::HTTP.get(url)

  # the response is in a format called JSON (or JavaScript Object Notation) - this parses it into a Ruby Hash
  body = JSON.parse(response)

  # print out the Ruby hash containing the status information
  p body

  # set the `status` variable to equal the status information from the GitHub servers
  status = body['status']

  # wait for 5 seconds so that we don't just keep spamming the GitHub servers
  sleep 5
end

# this line will not be executed until the loop stops. the loop will only stop until the status == 'good'
puts 'GitHub has recovered!'