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Introduction

A container showing "Up" in docker ps is not the same as a working application. The container process can be running while the web server inside is returning 500 errors, the database has deadlocked, the connection pool is exhausted, or the application is stuck in a loop consuming memory but serving no requests. From Docker's perspective, the container is fine. From your users' perspective, the service is down.

This is the gap that health checks and restart policies close together. Health checks give Docker a way to verify that the application inside a container is actually functioning, not just that the process is alive. Restart policies tell Docker what to do when a container stops unexpectedly. Together, they transform a container from something you have to manually babysit into something that detects its own failures and recovers automatically.

This guide covers every aspect of both mechanisms: the full health check parameter set including the lesser-known start_interval, the difference between CMD and CMD-SHELL, practical check patterns for common services, how restart policies behave across the four modes, the important distinction between always and unless-stopped, and how to combine both with depends_on for reliable startup ordering.

Running vs Actually Working: The Core Problem

Docker monitors the process that runs as PID 1 inside the container. If that process is alive, Docker considers the container running. That's all it can know on its own.

The problem is that "process running" is a very low bar. Consider these failure modes that Docker cannot detect without a health check:

  • A Node.js web server whose event loop is blocked by a CPU-intensive operation, accepting connections but never responding

  • A PostgreSQL container whose process is running but which hasn't finished initialization and isn't yet accepting connections

  • An API service whose database connection pool has been exhausted and returns database errors on every request

  • A Redis instance that's running but has hit its maxmemory limit and is refusing writes

  • A Java application that has run out of heap space, has the JVM process running, but throws OutOfMemoryError on every request

In every case, docker ps shows the container as Up. Users see failures. Without health checks, your only options are manual monitoring or waiting for users to report problems.

The Three Container Health States

Once a health check is configured, Docker tracks one of three states for the container:

  • starting — The container has just started and is within the start_period grace window. Health check failures during this period do not count toward the retry limit. The container stays in starting state until either a check passes (transitions to healthy) or the start_period elapses and failures start accumulating.

  • healthy — The most recent health check returned exit code 0. The container is functioning correctly.

  • unhealthy — The health check has failed retries consecutive times after the start_period has elapsed. The container is marked unhealthy. Docker itself does not automatically restart an unhealthy container on a standalone host, but orchestrators like Docker Swarm and Kubernetes use this state to reschedule or replace the container. In Compose, condition: service_healthy in depends_on blocks dependent services until this state reaches healthy.

  • These states are visible in docker ps output in the STATUS column: Up 5 minutes (healthy), Up 5 minutes (unhealthy), or Up 10 seconds (health: starting).

HEALTHCHECK in the Dockerfile

The HEALTHCHECK instruction bakes a health check directly into the image. Every container started from that image automatically has the check configured, without needing any additional flags or compose file entries:

FROM node:20-alpine

WORKDIR /app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm ci --production
COPY . .

EXPOSE 3000

HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=5s --start-period=15s --retries=3 \
  CMD curl -f http://localhost:3000/health || exit 1

CMD ["node", "server.js"]

The health check runs every 30 seconds, times out after 5 seconds, gives the application a 15-second grace period on startup, and marks the container unhealthy after 3 consecutive failures.

One important detail: only the last HEALTHCHECK instruction in a Dockerfile takes effect. If you have multiple HEALTHCHECK lines, Docker uses the final one. This also means a base image's HEALTHCHECK can be overridden by adding a new HEALTHCHECK in your derived image.

The HEALTHCHECK NONE form disables any health check inherited from a base image:

FROM my-base-image
HEALTHCHECK NONE    # disables the base image's health check

Health Check Parameters: All Five Explained

The HEALTHCHECK instruction accepts five timing and behavior options:

HEALTHCHECK \
  --interval=30s \
  --timeout=10s \
  --start-period=40s \
  --start-interval=5s \
  --retries=3 \
  CMD curl -f http://localhost:3000/health || exit 1

  • --interval (default: 30s) — How often Docker runs the health check after the start_period has elapsed. The timer starts from the end of one check to the beginning of the next, not from start to start. Setting this too low creates unnecessary load and noise from false positives; setting it too high means slow failure detection. A starting point of 30 seconds is reasonable for most web services.

  • --timeout (default: 30s) — How long Docker waits for the check command to complete. If the check takes longer than this, it's treated as a failure. Always set this shorter than interval. A hanging health check that takes the full default 30-second timeout, running every 30 seconds, creates continuous check overlap. Set timeout to roughly the 99th percentile response time of your health endpoint plus some margin.

  • --start-period (default: 0s) — Grace period after container start before failures count toward the retry limit. During this period, checks still run, and a passing check immediately transitions the container to healthy. But failures are silently ignored. This is the right place to account for slow-starting applications. JVM applications, for example, can take 30 to 60 seconds to fully initialize. Setting start_period to cover that initialization window prevents the container from being marked unhealthy before it's had a chance to start properly.

  • --start-interval (added in Docker 25.0 / Compose 2.20.2) — How often to run checks during the start_period. This lets you check more frequently during startup (when you want to know quickly when the service is ready) without incurring that same frequency cost during normal operation. For example, --start-period=60s --start-interval=5s --interval=30s checks every 5 seconds while starting up and every 30 seconds once healthy. This is particularly useful for depends_on: condition: service_healthy scenarios where you want dependent services to start as quickly as possible after the dependency is ready.

  • --retries (default: 3) — How many consecutive failures are required before marking the container unhealthy. A single failure doesn't immediately mark the container as unhealthy, which reduces noise from transient issues like a brief GC pause or momentary network hiccup.

CMD vs CMD-SHELL: When to Use Each

The health check command can be specified in two forms that behave differently:

CMD form — The command is executed directly by the container runtime without involving a shell. Arguments are passed as a JSON array:

HEALTHCHECK CMD ["curl", "-f", "http://localhost:3000/health"]
# Docker Compose equivalent
healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:3000/health"]

Use CMD when your command is a single executable with arguments and you don't need shell features. It's safer because there's no shell parsing, no risk of word splitting, and no shell injection issues.

CMD-SHELL form — The command is run via /bin/sh -c, giving access to shell features like pipes (|), logical operators (||, &&), and variable substitution:

HEALTHCHECK CMD-SHELL "pg_isready -U postgres || exit 1"
# Docker Compose equivalent
healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U postgres || exit 1"]
  # or as a plain string (equivalent to CMD-SHELL)
  test: "pg_isready -U postgres || exit 1"

Use CMD-SHELL when you need shell operators or pipes. The pg_isready example above uses || exit 1 to ensure a non-zero exit code is returned on failure, which is required for Docker to recognize the check as failed. Without it, pg_isready would return a descriptive message but might not return a non-zero exit code in all failure cases.

A practical note: slim images based on Alpine Linux often don't include curl. Either install it in your Dockerfile (RUN apk add --no-cache curl) or use wget as an alternative:

# wget alternative for Alpine images
HEALTHCHECK CMD wget --quiet --tries=1 --spider http://localhost:3000/health || exit 1

Health Checks in Docker Compose

Compose lets you define or override health checks per service in the healthcheck: block. This takes precedence over any HEALTHCHECK instruction in the image:

services:
  web:
    image: nginx
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 40s
      start_interval: 5s   # Docker Compose 2.20.2+

  db:
    image: postgres:16-alpine
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U postgres -d myapp"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5
      start_period: 30s
      start_interval: 5s

  cache:
    image: redis:7-alpine
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "redis-cli ping | grep PONG || exit 1"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 3

The Compose healthcheck block mirrors the Dockerfile parameters: test, interval, timeout, retries, start_period, and start_interval. Durations accept Go duration syntax: 30s, 1m30s, 2m.

Overriding and Disabling Health Checks

Sometimes you want to override a health check baked into an official image, or disable it entirely.

Override in Compose:

services:
  postgres:
    image: postgres:16
    healthcheck:
      # Override the image's default health check with a custom one
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U ${POSTGRES_USER} -d ${POSTGRES_DB}"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5
      start_period: 30s

Disable entirely:

services:
  some-service:
    image: some-image-with-built-in-healthcheck
    healthcheck:
      disable: true

Or in a Dockerfile:

HEALTHCHECK NONE

Disabling health checks is reasonable for development environments or one-off tasks where health state tracking adds no value. In production, don't disable health checks on services that other services depend on.

Practical Health Check Patterns by Service Type

Web / API services

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:3000/health"]
  interval: 30s
  timeout: 5s
  retries: 3
  start_period: 15s

Always check a dedicated /health endpoint rather than the root path. A good health endpoint verifies the application's critical dependencies: it can reach the database, the cache responds, required environment variables are set. It should return 200 OK when healthy and a 4xx or 5xx when something is wrong. Keep it fast — it runs every interval seconds.

PostgreSQL

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U postgres -d mydb"]
  interval: 10s
  timeout: 5s
  retries: 5
  start_period: 30s

pg_isready is the right tool here because it uses the actual PostgreSQL connection protocol rather than just checking if the port is open. It's included in all official PostgreSQL images.

MySQL / MariaDB

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD-SHELL", "mysqladmin ping -h localhost --silent"]
  interval: 10s
  timeout: 5s
  retries: 5
  start_period: 30s

For MariaDB, the official image includes a healthcheck.sh script:

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD", "healthcheck.sh", "--connect", "--innodb_initialized"]
  interval: 30s
  timeout: 10s
  retries: 3

Redis

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD-SHELL", "redis-cli ping | grep PONG || exit 1"]
  interval: 10s
  timeout: 5s
  retries: 3

The grep PONG step is important. redis-cli ping returns the string "PONG" on success. Without checking the output, a failed connection might still exit with code 0. Piping to grep PONG ensures a non-zero exit if the expected response isn't received.

Workers and background processes

For background workers with no HTTP endpoint, check whether the process itself is running correctly:

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pgrep -f 'python worker.py' > /dev/null || exit 1"]
  interval: 60s
  timeout: 10s
  retries: 3
  start_period: 30s

For workers that write a heartbeat file, check its modification time:

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD-SHELL", "test $(find /tmp/heartbeat -mmin -2) || exit 1"]
  interval: 120s
  timeout: 5s
  retries: 2

Inspecting Health Check Status and History

# See health status in docker ps (STATUS column)
docker ps

# Full health check details for a single container
docker inspect --format='{{json .State.Health}}' my-container

# Pretty-printed (requires jq)
docker inspect --format='{{json .State.Health}}' my-container | jq

# Quick health status only
docker inspect --format='{{.State.Health.Status}}' my-container

# In Compose
docker compose ps    # shows health column

The docker inspect health output includes the last five check results with timestamps, exit codes, and the stdout/stderr output of the check command. This is where to look when debugging why a container is stuck in unhealthy state.

The output looks like:

{
  "Status": "unhealthy",
  "FailingStreak": 3,
  "Log": [
    {
      "Start": "2024-01-15T10:00:00Z",
      "End": "2024-01-15T10:00:05Z",
      "ExitCode": 1,
      "Output": "curl: (7) Failed to connect to localhost port 3000: Connection refused\n"
    }
  ]
}

The Output field in the log tells you exactly what the check command returned, which is usually enough to diagnose the problem. A common issue to look for: the check command itself is missing from the container image (like curl not being installed in an Alpine image), which shows up as a command-not-found error in the output.

Docker Restart Policies: All Four Modes

Restart policies tell Docker what to do when a container's main process exits. Set them with --restart on docker run or with restart: in Compose.

no (default)

docker run --restart=no nginx

Docker never restarts the container after it exits, regardless of exit code. This is the default. Fine for development, one-off tasks, and containers you manage manually.

on-failure[:max-retries]

docker run --restart=on-failure:5 my-app

Restarts only when the container exits with a non-zero exit code (indicating an error). A clean exit with code 0 does not trigger a restart. The optional :max-retries suffix caps the number of restart attempts. After the limit is reached, the container stays stopped.

Use this for containers that should complete successfully and stop (like batch jobs), or in development where you want automatic recovery from crashes but not infinite restart loops.

always

docker run --restart=always nginx

  • Always restarts the container when it exits, regardless of exit code. Also starts the container automatically when the Docker daemon starts (after a host reboot, for example). If you manually stop the container with docker stop, Docker still restarts it when the daemon restarts.

  • Use always for services that must run after every host reboot and should never be intentionally stopped outside of deliberate teardown operations.

unless-stopped

docker run --restart=unless-stopped nginx

  • Behaves identically to always during normal operation. The one difference: if you explicitly stop the container with docker stop, it stays stopped even after the Docker daemon restarts. If the container exits on its own (crash, error, OOM kill), it restarts automatically.

  • This is the most practical policy for production services that you want to survive host reboots and recover from crashes, but that you occasionally need to stop intentionally during maintenance.

Restart Policies in Docker Compose

services:
  web:
    image: nginx
    restart: always

  api:
    build: ./api
    restart: unless-stopped

  worker:
    build: ./worker
    restart: on-failure

  db:
    image: postgres:16
    restart: unless-stopped

The restart: key in Compose directly corresponds to Docker's restart policies. For Swarm deployments, the deploy.restart_policy block provides more granular control:

services:
  api:
    image: my-app:1.0
    deploy:
      restart_policy:
        condition: on-failure
        delay: 5s
        max_attempts: 3
        window: 120s

The window field specifies how long Docker waits to decide if a restart was successful. If the container fails again within the window after restarting, that counts as another failure toward max_attempts. This prevents a container that fails two seconds after every restart from rapidly consuming retries.

Note that deploy.restart_policy only applies in Swarm mode (docker stack deploy). For standalone Compose, use the top-level restart: key.

always vs unless-stopped: The Difference That Matters

This is the detail that catches people in production. The difference is small but significant:

Scenario

always

unless-stopped

Container crashes

Restarts

Restarts

Docker daemon restarts (host reboot)

Starts

Starts

Explicitly stopped with docker stop + daemon restarts

Starts

Stays stopped

With always, there is no way to stop a container and have it stay stopped across a daemon restart. The only ways to permanently stop an always container are to remove it or change its restart policy.

With unless-stopped, docker stop sets a "stopped" flag. The container won't start again until you explicitly run docker start or docker compose up. This is what you want for most production services: automatic recovery from crashes and host reboots, with the ability to intentionally stop services during maintenance without them immediately restarting.

What Restart Policies Don't Fix

  • Restart policies handle process exits. They don't address the unhealthy-but-running scenario described at the start of this guide. If a container's process is running but the application is broken, the restart policy does nothing because the container hasn't exited.

  • This is why restart policies and health checks are complementary rather than alternatives. Health checks detect the broken-but-running state and expose it via the health status. Orchestrators like Docker Swarm and Kubernetes use that health status to take action (restart, reschedule, remove from the load balancer). On a standalone Docker host, you need external tooling or a watchdog process to act on unhealthy status since Docker itself won't auto-restart based on health check failures alone.

  • The practical approach for standalone Docker Compose deployments: combine a restart policy with a health check. The restart policy handles crashes. The health check surfaces degraded states that your monitoring system can alert on.

Combining Health Checks and Restart Policies

Using both together:

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:16-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: appuser
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD_FILE: /run/secrets/db_password
      POSTGRES_DB: myapp
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U appuser -d myapp"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5
      start_period: 30s
      start_interval: 5s

  api:
    build: ./api
    restart: unless-stopped
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:3000/health"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 20s
      start_interval: 5s
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy    # waits for pg_isready to pass

The interaction here: restart: unless-stopped handles crashes. The healthcheck on db prevents api from starting before the database is genuinely ready (not just started). If api crashes, unless-stopped restarts it. If db becomes unhealthy, the health status is visible in docker ps and available for monitoring systems to alert on.

Tuning Parameters for Different Applications

There is no one-size-fits-all configuration. Here's how to think about tuning each parameter:

For fast-response, latency-sensitive services (payment APIs, authentication services):

HEALTHCHECK --interval=10s --timeout=2s --start-period=15s --retries=2 \
  CMD curl -f http://localhost:8080/health || exit 1

Shorter interval and fewer retries mean faster failure detection. The tradeoff is more check traffic and higher sensitivity to transient hiccups.

For slow-starting services (JVM applications, Spring Boot, large frameworks):

HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=10s --start-period=90s --start-interval=5s --retries=3 \
  CMD curl -f http://localhost:8080/actuator/health || exit 1

A long start_period covers the JVM initialization time. start_interval=5s during startup means the container is marked healthy quickly once it's ready, even if the start_period hasn't elapsed. After startup, interval=30s prevents unnecessary check overhead.

For databases and heavy background workers:

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U postgres || exit 1"]
  interval: 10s
  timeout: 5s
  retries: 5
  start_period: 30s
  start_interval: 5s

More retries for databases because a single failed check during a brief write spike shouldn't mark the database unhealthy and block dependent services. Five retries at 10-second intervals means 50 seconds of consecutive failures before the database is considered unhealthy.

For batch workers and long-running jobs:

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD-SHELL", "test -f /tmp/worker.alive && test $(find /tmp/worker.alive -mmin -5) || exit 1"]
  interval: 5m
  timeout: 10s
  retries: 2
  start_period: 60s

The worker touches /tmp/worker.alive every few minutes to indicate it's still processing. The health check verifies the file exists and was modified recently. Long interval is appropriate since precise second-level failure detection isn't needed for background jobs.

Health Checks in Orchestration: Swarm and Kubernetes

Docker health checks become especially powerful in orchestrated environments.

  • In Docker Swarm, an unhealthy container is automatically replaced. The Swarm scheduler removes the unhealthy task, starts a new one, and only routes traffic to the replacement once it's healthy. This enables zero-downtime recovery from application-level failures that wouldn't have triggered a container restart on a standalone host.

  • In Kubernetes, the HEALTHCHECK Dockerfile instruction is not directly used. Kubernetes has its own probe system: liveness probes (equivalent to Docker health checks — restart if failing), readiness probes (remove from load balancer but don't restart), and startup probes (equivalent to start_period — give slow-starting containers time to initialize). Understanding Docker health checks gives you a solid foundation for Kubernetes probes since the concepts map directly.

  • Health checks also gate rolling deployments in both systems. A new version is only promoted to "ready" after its health check passes. If the health check on the new version fails, the rollout stops and the old version continues serving traffic. This makes health checks a critical part of safe deployment pipelines, not just runtime monitoring.

A Complete Production Example

A complete three-service stack with health checks, restart policies, and properly ordered startup:

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:16-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: appuser
      POSTGRES_DB: myapp
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD_FILE: /run/secrets/db_password
    secrets:
      - db_password
    volumes:
      - postgres-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U appuser -d myapp"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5
      start_period: 30s
      start_interval: 5s
    networks:
      - backend

  cache:
    image: redis:7-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "redis-cli ping | grep PONG || exit 1"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 10s
      start_interval: 5s
    networks:
      - backend

  api:
    build:
      context: ./api
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    restart: unless-stopped
    secrets:
      - db_password
    environment:
      DB_HOST: db
      DB_USER: appuser
      DB_NAME: myapp
      DB_PASSWORD_FILE: /run/secrets/db_password
      REDIS_URL: redis://cache:6379
      NODE_ENV: production
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:3000/health"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 20s
      start_interval: 5s
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy
      cache:
        condition: service_healthy
    networks:
      - backend

networks:
  backend:

volumes:
  postgres-data:

secrets:
  db_password:
    file: ./secrets/db_password.txt

The design decisions in this stack: all three services use unless-stopped so crashes trigger automatic restarts but intentional stops during maintenance persist across daemon restarts. Both db and cache have health checks that api waits on via condition: service_healthy, so the API never tries to connect to unready dependencies. start_interval: 5s on all services means dependent services start as quickly as possible after their dependencies become healthy. The api health check hits /health which the application should implement to verify its database and cache connections are working, not just that the HTTP server is listening.

Key Takeaways

  • A container showing "Up" in docker ps only means the process is running. It says nothing about whether the application is actually serving requests correctly. Health checks close that gap

  • Docker tracks three container health states: starting (grace period, failures ignored), healthy (check passing), and unhealthy (retries exhausted). States are visible in docker ps and docker inspect

  • HEALTHCHECK in the Dockerfile bakes the check into the image, making it available for all containers started from that image. The Compose healthcheck: block overrides or supplements it per deployment

  • The five parameters are interval (check frequency), timeout (max check duration), start_period (grace period for slow startups), start_interval (check frequency during startup, added in Docker 25), and retries (failures before marking unhealthy). Always set start_period for databases and JVM services

  • CMD executes the command directly without a shell. CMD-SHELL runs via /bin/sh -c, enabling pipes and || operators. Use CMD-SHELL for commands like pg_isready that benefit from shell operators

  • On Alpine images, curl is not installed by default. Add it in the Dockerfile or use wget --quiet --tries=1 --spider as a lightweight alternative

  • The four restart policies are no (never restart), on-failure (restart on non-zero exit, optionally with max retries), always (always restart including after daemon restart, even if explicitly stopped), and unless-stopped (always restart except when explicitly stopped)

  • The key distinction between always and unless-stopped: always restarts even after docker stop when the daemon restarts. unless-stopped respects an explicit stop and stays stopped. Use unless-stopped for services you need to occasionally stop during maintenance

  • Restart policies handle process exits. Health checks surface application-level failures where the process is running but broken. On a standalone host, Docker does not auto-restart based on health status — you need an orchestrator or external monitoring for that response

  • depends_on: condition: service_healthy holds dependent services until the health check passes. Without this, depends_on only waits for container start, not application readiness. Always use condition: service_healthy when starting order matters for application correctness

  • In Docker Swarm, unhealthy containers are automatically replaced. In Kubernetes, HEALTHCHECK maps to liveness probes. Health checks also gate rolling deployments: new versions only become active after their health check passes

Conclusion

  • Health checks and restart policies address two distinct failure scenarios that containers face in production. Restart policies handle the case where the container process exits, whether cleanly or with an error. Health checks handle the case where the process is running but the application is not functioning correctly.

  • Neither is sufficient alone. A container without a restart policy stops on the first crash and waits for manual intervention. A container without a health check appears healthy while silently failing. Together, they create the foundation for self-healing infrastructure: containers that recover from crashes automatically and surface application-level health clearly enough for orchestrators and monitoring systems to take appropriate action.

  • The patterns here scale from a simple single-container application with restart: unless-stopped all the way to multi-container stacks with carefully ordered startup, to Swarm and Kubernetes deployments where health status drives automated traffic routing and container replacement. Start with the basics and layer in the more advanced configurations as your reliability requirements grow.

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