Abstract

Health checks are kind of tests, applied to running applications and services:

• write healtchecks just as you would write tests, using assertions;

• collect and run healthchecks with test runners;

• use healthchecks to validate deployments;

• plug healthchecks in supervision and monitoring tools;

• in case of incidents, use healthchecks to diagnose problems.

Example

In your project’s root package, have a healthchecks package or module, where you assert your (running) application or service is ok:

import unittest
import hospital

@hospital.healthcheck
class DocumentationHealthCheck(unittest.TestCase):
    def test_http_200(self):
        url = 'http://hospital.readthedocs.org/en/0.6/'
        hospital.assert_http_response(url, status_code=200)

Then you can collect and run the healthchecks with command line or web service. Here is an example with command line:

$ hospital-cli <YOUR-PACKAGE>.healthchecks

Project status

hospital is not full-featured yet. Some important features are in the roadmap. See also vision.

Of course, any ideas, feedback or help are welcome :)

Resources

• Documentation: https://hospital.readthedocs.org

• IRC: #python-hospital on freenode

• Mailing-list: pythonhospital@librelist.com, see archives at http://librelist.com/browser/pythonhospital/

• PyPI page: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/hospital

• Code repository: https://github.com/python-hospital/hospital

• Continuous integration: https://travis-ci.org/python-hospital/hospital

• Bugs & feature requests: https://github.com/python-hospital/hospital/issues

• Changelog: https://hospital.readthedocs.org/en/latest/about/changelog.html

• Roadmap: https://github.com/python-hospital/hospital/milestones