Health checks

Health checks are important, but not mandatory for your application. It is a way to check if your application is started properly. Coolify provides a way to configure health checks for your application.

How it works

If you set a health check, Coolify (and integrated proxy) will check the health of your application by sending a request to the health check endpoint.

The integrated proxy only forwards the request to your application if the health check is successful. If the health check fails, the proxy will return a 502 Bad Gateway error.

What if I do not set a health check?

You get a warning next to your application's status. It is not mandatory, but it is recommended to set a health check. The integrated proxy will forward the request to your application without checking the health.

Caution!

Health checks run inside your container, so you need to have either curl or wget installed on your container. You can use an docker image that already includes curl/wget or add it to your Dockerfile yourself.

Without one of these packages, health checks will always fail and mark your container as unhealthy, which will cause the deployment to fail due to the failing health check.