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Rails-HealthCheck Setup Guide
You need to know if your Rails application is working. Rails health checks allows your app to self heal and notify you about issues. Let’s set it up!
This guide uses the Rails-Healthcheck gem. If you would rather use the built-in Rails::HealthController, please refer to our Rails Health Check Setup Guide.
Contents
Install Rails-HealthCheck Gem
Add the following to your Gemfile:
gem 'rails-healthcheck'
Setup your new gem with the rails generate command:
rails generate healthcheck:install
Customize Route
Open the initializer file at config/initializers/healthcheck.rb. Update the
.route property to /up. Set verbose=true to we can diagnose any errors. Save your changes and restart your app. Open 127.0.0.1:3000/up. You should get an output that looks like this: 
Add Health Checks
Next, we need to add checks for the services we rely on. Open up your healthcheck.rb initializer, again. In the bottom section, let’s add checks for database, cache and our mail service.
Database Health Check
healthcheck.rb comes with a pre-built example to test ActiveRecord. You can uncomment the 2 lines below:
config.add_check :database, -> { ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute('select 1') }
config.add_check :migrations, -> { ActiveRecord::Migration.check_pending! }
Cache Health Check
healthcheck.rb comes with a pre-built example to test our Rails.cache. You can uncomment the line below:
config.add_check :cache, -> { Rails.cache.read('some_key') }
Mail Service Check
Let’s add a check for our mail service. Your mail service may be different, but you can follow the template below. We’re just going to ping an reporting endpoint and make sure it replies with an OK status.
config.add_check :mail_service, -> {
response = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse("https://api.mailgun.net/v3/mydomain.com/stats"), {
'Authentication' => ENV['MAILGUN_API_KEY'],
})
return response.error!
}
Test Health Check
Restart your app to refresh the HealthCheck configuration. Open 127.0.0.1:3000/up and you should a json response with an http status of 200. This is what mine looks like:
Setup Uptime Monitor
Once you have your checks setup, it’s time to setup your uptime monitor. Log into your uptime service and add monitors for both of your services. You’ll want to check both /health/app and /health/upstream separately. You may also want to configure a minimum response time for /health/app to ensure your app is responsive.
You may also want to show your app’s status on your status page. Ensure you update your status page configuration to pull your uptime stats in to your status page.
Putting it all together
You now have uptime checks and alerts for your Rails application. If your app runs into issues you’ll be the first to know.
You may also be interested in our Heroku Uptime Service.