Given the move to auto scaling architectures front ended by load balancers, it is increasingly important to build into your application what is called a "health check". This is nothing more than a known url that some external service can monitor to ensure that your application is "up". A health check does nothing more than return an HTTP 200 (and sometimes it returns a JSON representation). Here's a simple Rails controller that I use for health checks:

class HealthController < ApplicationController
  def index
    results = {:status => "ok"}
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html { render :status => 200, :html => "ok" and return }
      format.json { render :status => 200, :json => results.to_json and return }
    end
  end
  
  # additional site monitoring functionality normally goes here
  
end

Here's how to test this with curl and get the headers you'd want to see:

curl -s -I https://foo.bar.something.com/health_check

The options have the following meaning:

  • -I, –head Show document info only
  • -s, –silent Silent mode (don't output anything)

Note: The -s is silencing the normal curl output of what it fetched from the url.

What you should see is something like this:

HTTP/2 200
date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 19:08:18 GMT
content-type: text/html
server: nginx/1.10.3 (Ubuntu)
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
x-content-type-options: nosniff
set-cookie: _mkra_ctxt=3b46df998ac73a6cb44bbb8dc2a09918--200; path=/; max-age=5; HttpOnly; secure
cache-control: no-cache
x-request-id: 7158be3a-7990-4549-b780-fca5757069d3
x-runtime: 0.208121
strict-transport-security: max-age=15552000; includeSubDomains

References

Here are some great curl references: