A new healthcheck feature can help Web Application Hosting customers keep their apps up and running consistently, even during redeployments.

Application owners can enable healthcheck by defining a health-testing endpoint (path) within an app’s web process settings. Kinsta’s healthcheck service polls that endpoint every 10 seconds with the expectation that a healthy application will return an HTTP request response of 200 (success).

Kinsta’s healthcheck helps improve an application’s uptime in two ways:

  1. During regular runtime, Kinsta will attempt to restart the application’s pods automatically if the check fails three times in a row.
  2. During the redeployment of an application, Kinsta will keep the existing pod running until the new deployment successfully responds to the healthcheck polling. That’s zero downtime on deployments!

Enable healthcheck for your application

To specify a healthcheck endpoint for your application within the MyKinsta dashboard, navigate to Applications > app_name > Processes and then click the Edit icon beside your app’s web process:

Screen shot showing an application's process list in the MyKinsta dashboard.
Locating the Edit icon for an application’s web process.

Below, we’ve specified the path /health for an application’s healthcheck endpoint in the Edit process dialog:

Screenshot of the Edit Process dialog in the MyKinsta dashboard.
Adding a healthcheck path to an application’s web process.

You can specify any healthcheck path for which a successful HTTP response would signify that your application is up and running. That could be as simple as your application’s root path / or an endpoint specifically developed for the healthcheck task.

If your application requires database access to be fully functional, your healthcheck endpoint should return a successful HTTP response only if database connectivity is functional. This will ensure that a deployment that includes a database won’t go live until the app and its database are talking.

Choose Kinsta for zero downtime

If you’re not already a Kinsta customer, here’s how you can get your next project deployed without downtime on our Application Hosting platform:

  1. Get inspired by browsing our library of quick-start examples to see how to deploy your favorite technologies from Git hosts like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
  2. Create your MyKinsta account and start building risk-free!

When you deploy, your application will run on top-tier infrastructure in the Google Cloud.