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Overview

The health check endpoint provides a simple way to verify that the webhook server is running and responding to requests. This endpoint is commonly used for monitoring, load balancer health checks, and container orchestration readiness probes.

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Endpoint

GET /webhook_server/healthcheck

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Request

No request parameters or headers are required.

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Response

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status
integer
HTTP status code (always 200 when server is healthy)
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message
string
Status message (always “Alive” when server is healthy)

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Status Codes

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200
Success
Server is running and healthy
If the server is not responding, the request will fail with a connection error or timeout (not an HTTP error response).

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Examples

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Basic health check

curl http://localhost:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck
Response: 
{
  "status": 200,
  "message": "Alive"
}

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Health check with verbose output

curl -v http://localhost:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck
Response: 
*   Trying 127.0.0.1:5000...
* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 5000 (#0)
> GET /webhook_server/healthcheck HTTP/1.1
> Host: localhost:5000
> User-Agent: curl/7.68.0
> Accept: */*
>
* Mark bundle as not supporting multiuse
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< content-type: application/json
< content-length: 32
<
{"status":200,"message":"Alive"}

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Using wget

wget -qO- http://localhost:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck
Response: 
{"status":200,"message":"Alive"}

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Use Cases

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Docker / Podman Health Checks

Add to your Docker Compose configuration: 
services:
  github-webhook-server:
    image: ghcr.io/myk-org/github-webhook-server:latest
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "--fail", "http://localhost:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 40s

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Kubernetes Liveness and Readiness Probes

Add to your Kubernetes deployment: 
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: github-webhook-server
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: webhook-server
          image: ghcr.io/myk-org/github-webhook-server:latest
          livenessProbe:
            httpGet:
              path: /webhook_server/healthcheck
              port: 5000
            initialDelaySeconds: 30
            periodSeconds: 30
            timeoutSeconds: 10
            failureThreshold: 3
          readinessProbe:
            httpGet:
              path: /webhook_server/healthcheck
              port: 5000
            initialDelaySeconds: 5
            periodSeconds: 10
            timeoutSeconds: 5
            failureThreshold: 3

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Load Balancer Health Checks

NGINX upstream health check: 
upstream webhook_servers {
    server webhook1.example.com:5000 max_fails=3 fail_timeout=30s;
    server webhook2.example.com:5000 max_fails=3 fail_timeout=30s;
}

server {
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://webhook_servers;
    }
}
HAProxy health check: 
backend webhook_servers
    option httpchk GET /webhook_server/healthcheck
    http-check expect status 200
    server webhook1 webhook1.example.com:5000 check inter 10s
    server webhook2 webhook2.example.com:5000 check inter 10s

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Monitoring and Alerting

Prometheus monitoring with blackbox_exporter: 
# prometheus.yml
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'webhook-server-health'
    metrics_path: /probe
    params:
      module: [http_2xx]
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - http://webhook-server:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        target_label: __param_target
      - source_labels: [__param_target]
        target_label: instance
      - target_label: __address__
        replacement: blackbox-exporter:9115
Uptime monitoring with cron: 
#!/bin/bash
# check_webhook_health.sh

URL="http://localhost:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck"
RESPONSE=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "$URL")

if [ "$RESPONSE" != "200" ]; then
    echo "Webhook server unhealthy! HTTP status: $RESPONSE"
    # Send alert (email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.)
    exit 1
fi

echo "Webhook server healthy"
exit 0
Schedule with cron: 
*/5 * * * * /path/to/check_webhook_health.sh

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Systemd Service Health Check

# /etc/systemd/system/webhook-server.service
[Unit]
Description=GitHub Webhook Server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/webhook-server
ExecStartPost=/bin/sleep 5
ExecStartPost=/usr/bin/curl --fail http://localhost:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck
Restart=always
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

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Testing Server Availability

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Quick availability test

curl -f http://localhost:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck && echo "Server is up" || echo "Server is down"

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Test with timeout

curl --max-time 5 http://localhost:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck

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Test and extract status

STATUS=$(curl -s http://localhost:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck | jq -r '.status')
if [ "$STATUS" = "200" ]; then
    echo "Health check passed"
else
    echo "Health check failed"
    exit 1
fi

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Continuous monitoring

# Check health every 10 seconds
watch -n 10 'curl -s http://localhost:5000/webhook_server/healthcheck | jq'

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Response Time Expectations

The health check endpoint is lightweight and typically responds in:
  • Local requests: < 5ms
  • Same datacenter: < 20ms
  • Cross-region: < 100ms
If response times consistently exceed these values, investigate:
  • Server resource constraints (CPU, memory)
  • Network connectivity issues
  • Server overload from webhook processing

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Limitations

The health check endpoint only verifies that:
  • The FastAPI application is running
  • The HTTP server can accept and respond to requests
It does NOT verify:
  • GitHub API connectivity
  • Configuration file validity
  • Database or log file accessibility
  • Background task processing
  • Token validity or rate limits
For comprehensive health monitoring, combine this endpoint with:
  • Log Viewer API for webhook processing metrics
  • Application logs for detailed diagnostics
  • GitHub API rate limit monitoring
  • Custom health checks for critical dependencies

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