Laravel Health Check is a very useful package for checking the health of your Laravel & Lumen applications. The purpose of this package is to surface a health-check endpoint on /health which, when hit, returns the status of all the services and dependencies your project relies on, along with the overall health of your system. This is useful in both development and production for debugging issues with a faulty application.

This package also adds a /ping endpoint. Just hit /ping and receive pong in response.

Installation

To install the package you have to run this command to add the package to your dependencies.

composer require ans-group/laravel-health-check 

Checks

Scheduler Health Check

The scheduler health check works by using a time-limited cache key on your project every minute. You will need to register the CacheSchedulerRunning command to run every minute in your projects Kernel.php. You can customize the cache key and length of time in minutes before the scheduler not running will trigger an error.

$schedule->command(CacheSchedulerRunning::class)->everyMinute();

Creating your own health checks

It’s very simple to create your own health checks.

In this example, we’ll create a health check for Redis.

You first need to create your health-check class, you can put this inside App\HealthChecks. In this case, the class would be App\HealthChecks\RedisHealthCheck.

Every health check needs to extend the base HealthCheck class and implement a status() method. You should also set the $name property for display purposes.

<?php

namespace App\HealthChecks;

use UKFast\HealthCheck\HealthCheck;

class RedisHealthCheck extends HealthCheck
{
    protected $name = 'my-fancy-redis-check';

    public function status()
    {
        return $this->okay();
    }
}

Now we’ve got our basic class setup, we can add it to the list of checks to run in our config/healthcheck.php file.

Open up config/healthcheck.php and go to the ‘checks’ array. Add your class to the list of those checks:

'checks' => [
    // ...
    App\HealthChecks\RedisHealthCheck::class,
]

If you hit the /health endpoint now, you’ll see that there’s a my-fancy-redis-check property and it should return OK for the status.

We can now go about actually implementing the check properly.

Go back to the status() method in the RedisHealthCheck class.

Add in the following code:

public function status()
{
    try {
        Redis::ping();
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        return $this->problem('Failed to connect to redis', [
            'exception' => $this->exceptionContext($e),
        ]);
    }

    return $this->okay();
}

You’ll need to import the following at the top as well.

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Redis;
use UKFast\HealthCheck\HealthCheck;
use Exception;

Finally, hit the /health endpoint, depending on if your app can actually hit Redis, you’ll see the status of Redis. If it’s still returning OK try changing REDIS_HOST to something that doesn’t exist to trip the error.

Closing Notes

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