James Ball

Web Developer

Building a Standalone Health Status App

The purpose of this tutorial to create a standalone health monitor for sites and applications on multiple domains. On the route url of the site will be a rendered list for developers and colleagues.

This tutorial also adds a /ping endpoint that is used to receive “pong” in response.

As well as /json endpoint to receive the status data in JSON.

Create Laravel App & Install Packages

To get started we’ll need to set up a Laravel application, install Guzzle and ukfast/laravel-health-check:

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laravel new health

cd health

cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate

composer require ukfast/laravel-health-check
composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="UKFast\HealthCheck\HealthCheckServiceProvider" --tag="config"

Create Your First Health Check

We’ll create an example health check for this site. You should change J84115 to a namespace for the app or business as well as the class name, $name, $domain endpoint.

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<?php

namespace App\HealthChecks\J84115;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;
use UKFast\HealthCheck\HealthCheck;

class JamesBallSiteHealthCheck extends HealthCheck
{
    public $name = 'jb-site';
    public $domain = "https://james-ball.co.uk/ping";

    public function status()
    {
        $response = Http::get($this->domain);

        if ($response->successful()) {
            return $this->okay();
        } else {
            return $this->problem("Failed to connect to $this->domain");
        }
    }
}

Register Your check

Open config/healthcheck.php and add the HealthCheck class namespace entry to the checks index or replace the existing data:

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/*
 * List of health checks to run when determining the health
 * of the service
 */
'checks' => [
    App\HealthChecks\J84115\JamesBallSiteHealthCheck::class,
],

And if required you can: update the route-paths.health value to json, this will allow you to access the data as JSON at {app_url}/json.

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/**
 * Paths to host the health check and ping endpoints
 */
'route-paths' => [
    'health' => '/json',
    'ping' => '/ping',
],

Create a Page to render the check(s)

Create the following file resources/views/health.blade.php:

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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="{{ str_replace('_', '-', app()->getLocale()) }}">
    <head>
        <title>Health Checker</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        @foreach ($healths as $name => $health)
            <div>
                <strong>{{ $health->label }}</strong>

                <p style="color: {{ $health->status === 'OK' ? 'green': 'red' }};">
                    {{ $health->status }}
                </p>
            </div>
            <hr>
        @endforeach
    </body>
</html>

Pass the Health Check Data to the view

Add the following to routes/web.php or a controller that you’ve created.

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use UKFast\HealthCheck\Controllers\HealthCheckController;

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Route::get('/', function () {
    $response = (new HealthCheckController)->__invoke(app());

    $healths = json_decode($response->content(), true);

    $healths = collect($healths)
        ->map(fn ($value, $key) => (object) ([
            'label' => $key,
            'status' => is_string($value)
                ? $value
                : $value['status'],
        ]));

    return view('health', [
        'healths' => $healths,
    ]);
});

Demo the application

Just start up the Laravel server with:

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php artisan serve

The go to http://localhost:8000 to preview.