If you’ve been digging into the rabbit hole of Docker Compose healthchecks and restart policies, or maybe got a bit confused by my previous posts, you’ve probably wondered: “Can I use restart policies to restart containers when they become unhealthy?” tldr: By default, nope, not out of the box. Yet, you can make it work by implementing some application logic to it. restart policies Currently there are 4 restart policies: ...
You’ve got healthchecks setup (because you read those previous posts, right?), your containers are dutifully reporting their health status, and all is good. Until 2 AM when that flaky service decides to hang, your healthcheck correctly marks it as unhealthy, and… nothing happens. The container just sits there, unhealthy and useless, waiting for you to manually restart it. That’s where autoheal comes in — the unsung hero that actually does something when your containers get unhealthy. ...
As a follow-up to Dockerfile HEALTCHECK let’s see what Docker Compose healtchecks are for. Think of it as Dockerfile healtchecks with the flexibility to say “actually, in this environment let’s do things differently.” when dockerfile healthchecks fall short Picture this: your Dockerfile has a nice healthcheck that hits http://localhost:3000/health. Works great in prod where your app runs on port 3000. But in your local dev environment, you’re mapping that to port 8080, and in staging, it’s behind a reverse proxy with a completely different health endpoint. ...