Health Check Endpoints

This gives you the four essential health check endpoints for keeping services alive in production: liveness probes that tell Kubernetes when to restart your container, readiness checks that verify dependencies before sending traffic, startup probes for slow-booting apps, and deep checks for comprehensive monitoring. The implementation is straightforward, with lightweight liveness checks that never hit external services and readiness endpoints that actually test your database and Redis connections. What I appreciate here is the clear table showing exactly what each probe does and what happens when it fails. The Kubernetes config examples are production-ready, and the best practices section correctly emphasizes keeping liveness checks dependency-free to avoid restart loops. If you're debugging probe failures or setting up auto-scaling, this covers the essential patterns.

skills.sh installs: 420
GitHub stars: 248
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add secondsky/claude-skills --skill health-check-endpoints --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Health Check Endpoints

Implement health checks for monitoring service availability and readiness.

Probe Types

Probe	Purpose	Failure Action
Liveness	Is process alive?	Restart container
Readiness	Can handle traffic?	Remove from LB
Startup	Has app started?	Delay other probes
Deep	All deps healthy?	Trigger alerts

Implementation (Express)

class HealthChecker {
  async checkDatabase() {
    const start = Date.now();
    try {
      await db.query('SELECT 1');
      return { status: 'healthy', latency: Date.now() - start };
    } catch (err) {
      return { status: 'unhealthy', error: String(err?.message || err) };
    }
  }

  async checkRedis() {
    try {
      await redis.ping();
      return { status: 'healthy' };
    } catch (err) {
      return { status: 'unhealthy', error: err.message };
    }
  }

  async getReadiness() {
    const checks = await Promise.all([
      this.checkDatabase(),
      this.checkRedis()
    ]);
    const healthy = checks.every(c => c.status === 'healthy');
    return { healthy, checks };
  }
}

SKILL.md on GitHub