healthcheck

A tiny HTTP client for distroless container health checks. It sends a HTTP GET request to the URL passed as argument and exits with 0 if the request succeeds, or 1 if it the URL is invalid, unreachable, or the request fails. The binary is self-contained (statically linked), so it can be easily copied into containers which require a healthcheck but don't have any other dependencies.

Binary Size

Binary	Size
curl	6.1mb
wget	1.4mb
healthcheck	0.54mb

Installing healthcheck

Binaries are provided for both x86_64 and arm64 architectures, both as Docker images and as direct download from the Github releases page.

Docker

Since this binary is primarily meant to be used for Docker health checks, the easiest way to consume this binary is through Docker. The binaries are published in the ghcr.io/meck93/distroless-http-healthcheck repository in scratch containers, and you can use the version tags or latest.

See below for an examplary usage in a Dockerfile.

FROM ghcr.io/meck93/distroless-http-healthcheck:latest AS healthcheck

FROM scratch AS runner

COPY --from=healthcheck /healthcheck /healthcheck

HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=30s --start-period=5s --retries=3 CMD ["/healthcheck", "http://localhost:8080/healthz"]

CMD ["/example"]

Github Releases (Direct Download)

The binary is available through Github Releases, and can be downloaded here.

Credits

This work is heavily inspired by the following project and blog post:

• cryptaliagy/httpget - by Natalia Maximo
• Docker Health Checks on Distroless Containers with Rust - by Natalia Maximo