Implementing a healthcheck for a Docker Container
Revathi Joshi
Posted on February 25, 2023
Among all the week 1's home-work exercises, I like the most about how you implement a healthcheck for a Docker Container. So I thought of writing an article about it
Docker allows us to tell the platform on how to test that our application is healthy.
When Docker starts a container, it monitors the process that the container runs.
If the process ends, the container exits.
We can specify certain options before the CMD operation, these includes:
It is self-explanatory
172.17.0.2 - this is the IP Address of the EC2 instance
HEALTHCHECK --interval=5s CMD ping -c 1 172.17.0.2
--interval=DURATION (default: 30s)
--timeout=DURATION (default: 30s)
--start-period=DURATION (default: 0s)
--retries=N (default: 3)
Please visit my GitHub Repository for CI-CD/Docker/ECS/ECR articles on various topics being updated on constant basis.
References
1. launch a container from busybox image
docker container run -dt --name busybox busybox sh
# check container is up and running
docker ps
2. get the ip address of the busybox container
docker inspect busybox
running for 5s
3. Create a Dockerfile
FROM busybox
HEALTHCHECK --interval=5s CMD ping -c 1 172.17.0.2
4. build the container
docker build -t monitoring .
dpocker images
5. launch a container from the monitoring image
docker container run -dt --name monitor monitoring sh
docker ps to see the healthcheck
depending upon the interval you specify the healthcheck would be perfomon accordings
it is healthy because it is able to ping the busybox container
6. docker inspect monitor to see the healthy exitcode 0
7. healthy exitcode 0
8. docker stop busybox, Docker Container becomes unhealthy
docker ps
9. specify interval=5s and retries=1
docker run -dt --name tmp --health-cmd "curl -f http://localhost" --health-interval=5s --health-retries=1 busybox sh
10. Clean Up
docker stop CONTAINER NAME
docker rm CONTAINER NAME
docker rmi -f REPOSITORY:TAG NAME
docker rmi -f IMAGE ID
What we have done so far
- We have successfuly learnt how to implement a healthcheck on a Docker Container.
Posted on February 25, 2023
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