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Health Checks

Authara exposes a health check command that can be used by container runtimes and orchestration systems to verify that the service is running correctly.

This allows systems such as:

  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • load balancers
  • container platforms

to automatically detect unhealthy instances.

Container Health Check

The official Authara container image includes a built-in health check.

Example:

HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=3s --start-period=10s \
  CMD ["/app/authara", "healthcheck"]

The container runtime periodically executes this command.

If the command exits successfully, the container is considered healthy.

If the command fails, the container is considered unhealthy.

Health Check Command

Authara provides a dedicated command for health checks:

authara healthcheck

The command performs a minimal internal check to verify that the server is operational.

It exits with:

Exit Code Meaning
0 Service is healthy
non-zero Service is unhealthy

The command does not produce user-facing output and is intended for automated checks.

Typical Usage

Container runtimes execute the health check automatically.

Example Docker behavior:

  1. container starts
  2. Docker waits for start-period
  3. Docker executes the health check command periodically
  4. if checks fail repeatedly, the container is marked unhealthy

Container orchestration systems may then:

  • restart the container
  • remove it from load balancing
  • trigger alerts

Purpose

Health checks allow operators to ensure that:

  • the Authara process is running
  • the container is functioning correctly
  • the service can be restarted automatically if necessary

They are an important part of production deployments.

Summary

Authara provides a built-in health check command designed for container environments.

The official container image configures this command automatically through Docker's HEALTHCHECK directive.