Healthful is a small, low-dependency Scala library providing HealthServer, an HTTP server for health checks.
Many container orchestration systems (e.g. Kubernetes) can be configured to perform health checks on a service. These health checks are used to restart the service when it is no longer live, or to send it traffic while it's ready.
While your service may already have an HTTP library you can use to implement these health checks, it's preferable to decouple the health checks from other service capabilities, for a few reasons:
- Even if you have an HTTP server already, you may want or need to change it from time to time. Using a decoupled health server prevents you from having to rewrite your health checks in this scenario.
- You may have multiple HTTP servers within a service, and tying the overall service health check to just one of them is misleading.
- Your existing HTTP server is exposed to the public internet, but your health checks should not be.
It's also nice to not have to write the health checks in the first place!
This library implements liveness and readiness endpoints using com.sun.net.httpserver.HttpServer, an officially supported part of the OpenJDK standard. Therefore, no additional HTTP dependencies are included or required. Logging is accomplished through SLF4J and configuration through Lightbend Config, both Java libraries. There are no Scala dependencies required beyond the stdlib.
Healthful is available on Maven Central for Scala 2.12, 2.13, and 3. Java 11+ is required.
Add the following dependency description to your build.sbt:
"ca.dvgi" %% "healthful" % "<latest>"
import ca.dvgi.healthful.HealthServer
// synchronously starts the HealthServer, which will be live but not ready
val hs = HealthServer("MyAwesomeService")
// setup service functionailty, e.g. run an HTTP server
hs.markReady() // readiness endpoint changes to 200
sys.addShutdownHook {
hs.markUnready() // readiness endpoint changes back to 503
// shutdown service functionality, e.g. drain HTTP requests
hs.close()
}The liveness endpoint always returns 200 OK, assuming that your JVM process is in fact live.
The readiness endpoint returns 503 Service Unavailable until HealthServer#markReady() is called. It then returns 200 OK until HealthServer#markUnready() is called.
By default, the liveness check is available at /healthz and the readiness check at /ready, on port 9990.
To modify these defaults, either configure in application.conf:
healthful {
port = 9991
liveness-path = "/my-health"
readiness-path = "/my-ready"
}
or pass extra arguments to HealthServer.apply:
val hs = HealthServer("MyAwesomeService", 9991, "/my-health", "/my-ready")Contributions in the form of Issues and PRs are welcome.
