Health Check Endpoints

Introduction

Health checks verify your application is working and ready to receive traffic.

Types of Checks

Liveness: Is the application running?

Readiness: Is the application ready for traffic?

Deep Check: Are dependencies (DB, cache) working?

Implementation

python
from django.http import JsonResponse
from django.db import connection

def health(request):
    return JsonResponse({'status': 'ok'})

def health_deep(request):
    checks = {}
    healthy = True
    
    try:
        connection.ensure_connection()
        checks['database'] = 'ok'
    except:
        checks['database'] = 'failed'
        healthy = False
    
    status = 200 if healthy else 503
    return JsonResponse({'status': 'healthy' if healthy else 'unhealthy', 'checks': checks}, status=status)

Kubernetes Probes

yaml
livenessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /health/
    port: 8000
readinessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /health/ready/
    port: 8000

Best Practices

1. Separate liveness/readiness: Different purposes.
2. Check dependencies: Database, cache, queues.
3. Return proper status codes: 200 or 503.

Summary

Health checks let load balancers and orchestrators know if your app is working. Return 200 for healthy, 503 for unhealthy. Check database and cache connectivity.