How do you create a health check endpoint in Spring Boot?
Table of Contents
Introduction
In modern applications, it’s essential to monitor the health of your system to ensure that it’s running smoothly. A health check endpoint helps developers and system administrators to verify whether an application is functioning properly. In Spring Boot, this can be easily achieved by leveraging Spring Actuator, a powerful library that provides production-ready features for monitoring and managing your application.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of creating a health check endpoint in a Spring Boot application using Spring Actuator.
Steps to Create a Health Check Endpoint in Spring Boot
1. Add Spring Actuator Dependency
Spring Boot Actuator provides built-in support for health checks. To enable Actuator in your project, you need to add the dependency in your pom.xml file.
Spring Actuator exposes several useful endpoints, including the /actuator/health endpoint, which provides the health status of your application.
2. Enable Health Endpoint
By default, the health endpoint is not exposed for security reasons. To enable it, add the following configuration to your application.properties or application.yml file.
**application.properties**:
Or, if you want to expose all available Actuator endpoints:
This configuration exposes the health check endpoint at /actuator/health.
3. Customize Health Check (Optional)
While the default health check covers basic system status (like the availability of database connections, disk space, etc.), you can extend the health check functionality to include application-specific checks.
To do this, you can create a custom health indicator by implementing HealthIndicator in Spring Boot.
Here’s an example of how to create a custom health check that checks if a specific service is available:
In this example, CustomHealthIndicator checks a custom condition (in this case, the availability of a service) and reports the health status accordingly. The Health.up() method indicates a healthy state, while Health.down() signals a failure.
4. Access the Health Endpoint
Once the application is up and running, you can access the health check endpoint at:
If everything is configured correctly, you’ll receive a JSON response similar to the following:
If there’s an issue, the response could look like this:
5. Secure the Health Endpoint (Optional)
In production environments, you may want to secure the health endpoint to prevent unauthorized access. You can achieve this by configuring Spring Security to secure Actuator endpoints.
Here’s an example of how to restrict access to the /actuator/health endpoint:
**SecurityConfig.java**:
In this configuration, only users with the ADMIN role will be able to access the health check endpoint.
6. Enable More Health Checks (Optional)
Spring Boot Actuator provides several built-in health indicators, such as checks for database connectivity, disk space, JMS queues, and more. To enable additional health indicators, you can configure them in your application.properties file.
For example, to enable database health checks, add this to your configuration:
Other available checks can be enabled in a similar manner. You can consult the Spring Boot documentation for more health indicators provided by Actuator.
Conclusion
Creating a health check endpoint in Spring Boot is simple with the help of Spring Boot Actuator. The default /actuator/health endpoint gives you a quick overview of the application’s health status, and you can easily extend it with custom health checks for your services. By enabling security and customizing the checks, you can monitor and manage your application more effectively in both development and production environments.