Health Checks

Vendure exposes a /health endpoint that reports the status of critical system dependencies. This endpoint is essential for production deployments where load balancers, container orchestrators, and monitoring tools need to know whether the application is healthy and ready to serve traffic.

How it works

The health check system is built on the NestJS Terminus module. Each configured health check strategy probes a specific dependency and reports back with a status. The /health endpoint aggregates all strategy results into a single response.

A healthy response indicates that all dependencies are reachable and functioning correctly. If any strategy reports a failure, the endpoint returns an unhealthy status, signaling that the system may not be able to serve requests reliably.

Built-in strategies

Vendure ships with two health check strategies out of the box:

TypeORMHealthCheckStrategy — verifies that the database connection is alive by executing a simple query. Since the database is the most critical dependency for any Vendure instance, this strategy is enabled by default.
HttpHealthCheckStrategy — checks the availability of an external HTTP service. This is useful when your Vendure instance depends on external APIs, such as a payment gateway or a third-party inventory system.

Configuration

Health checks are configured via the systemOptions.healthChecks property in the VendureConfig. You can enable or disable individual strategies and configure their parameters to match your infrastructure.

Use cases

The /health endpoint serves several important operational purposes:

Load balancer probes — configure your load balancer to poll /health and route traffic only to healthy instances.
Container orchestration — use the endpoint as a Kubernetes liveness or readiness probe to automatically restart unhealthy pods or delay traffic until the application is ready.
Monitoring dashboards — integrate with monitoring tools to track uptime and get alerted when dependencies become unreachable.

Custom strategies

When your application has dependencies beyond the database and HTTP services, you can implement the HealthCheckStrategy interface to create custom checks. For example, a custom strategy might verify connectivity to a Redis cache, an Elasticsearch cluster, or a message broker.

Custom strategies are added to the same systemOptions.healthChecks configuration array alongside the built-in strategies, and their results are included in the aggregated /health response.