Keeping Your Laravel Applications Healthy: The New Health Route in Laravel 11

With the release of Laravel 11, developers received an array of features designed to enhance the development experience, streamline application structures, and bolster security. Among these advancements, the introduction of a dedicated health route stands out as a pivotal addition for maintaining the well-being of Laravel applications.

How to Implement the Health Route

The health route (/up) serves as a vital checkpoint that can be invoked by third-party health monitoring services or orchestration systems, like Kubernetes. This enables automated systems to continuously monitor the application’s status, ensuring that any potential issues are identified and addressed promptly, minimizing downtime and improving user experience.

How to Implement the Health Route

Implementing the health route in Laravel 11 is remarkably straightforward. By default, new Laravel applications include the health routing directive, automatically defining a simple health-check endpoint at /up. This endpoint can then be customized to perform specific health checks relevant to your application, such as verifying database connectivity or ensuring cache functionality.

Route::get('/up', function () {
    // Perform specific health checks
    try {
        DB::connection()->getPdo();
        Cache::store('file')->get('key');
        // Additional checks as needed
        return response()->json(['status' => 'ok'], 200);
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        return response()->json(['status' => 'error', 'message' => 'Service Unavailable'], 503);
    }
});

In this example, a custom route /up is defined to perform health checks, including database connectivity and cache functionality. If all checks pass, it returns a JSON response with a status of “ok”. If any check fails, it responds with an error status and a “Service Unavailable” message, which can then be utilized by monitoring tools to alert the development team.