Health checks

Feather registers these on every app. You do not write them.

Endpoint	Purpose	What it checks
`/health`	Full health check	Database connectivity, app running
`/health/live`	Liveness probe	The process is alive — always 200 if responding
`/health/ready`	Readiness probe	The app can serve traffic — database connected

Liveness versus readiness

Liveness answers “is the process alive?” If this fails, the container should be restarted. Readiness answers “can it handle requests?” If this fails, stop sending traffic but do not restart. Example: your app is running but the database is down. Liveness passes because the process is alive; readiness fails because it cannot serve requests. The load balancer stops routing to this instance while it recovers.

Response format

{
  "status": "healthy",
  "timestamp": "2024-01-15T10:30:00.000Z",
  "checks": {
    "database": "ok"
  }
}

Returns 200 OK when healthy and 503 Service Unavailable when not.

Wiring it up

Load balancer
Kubernetes
Docker

For AWS ALB, GCP and similar:

Setting	Value
Health check path	`/health`
Healthy threshold	2
Unhealthy threshold	3
Interval	30 seconds

livenessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /health/live
    port: 8000
  initialDelaySeconds: 5
  periodSeconds: 10

readinessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /health/ready
    port: 8000
  initialDelaySeconds: 5
  periodSeconds: 10

The generated Dockerfile already has HEALTHCHECK ... curl /health, and deploy/deploy.sh waits on it before declaring a deploy finished. Most PaaS hosts either detect /health or take it as a configured health-check path.

Prefer /health over a hand-written route. A container with a broken DATABASE_URL reports unhealthy instead of quietly serving 500s.

Apps scaffolded before 0.9.7 also have a routes/api/health.py giving /api/health. That route is yours, not the framework’s, and it only proves the process is listening. Point new health checks at /health.

Get started

Building the UI

Backend

Features

Tooling

Testing

Deployment

Liveness versus readiness

Response format

Wiring it up

​Liveness versus readiness

​Response format

​Wiring it up

Liveness versus readiness

Response format

Wiring it up