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Health Checks

Gloo Gateway includes an HTTP health checking plug-in that you can enable in a Gateway (which becomes an Envoy Listener). This plug-in responds to health check requests directly with either a 200 OK or 503 Service Unavailable message, depending on the current draining state of Envoy.

Before you begin: To activate a health check endpoint on a Gateway, you must first configure a virtual service. For example, you can follow one of the destination selection guides to create a virtual service.

Edit the gateway proxy that you want to add the health check to. Note: If you use TLS termination in Gloo Gateway, use the gateway-proxy-ssl tab to configure the Gateway Proxy SSL.
- gateway-proxy
- gateway-proxy-ssl
```
kubectl --namespace gloo-system edit gateway gateway-proxy
```
```
kubectl --namespace gloo-system edit gateway gateway-proxy-ssl
```

Add the healthCheck stanza to the spec.options section of the gateway. Note that the HTTP path of any health check requests must be exact matches to the value of healthCheck.path.

gateway-proxy
gateway-proxy-ssl

apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: gateway-proxy
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  bindAddress: '::'
  bindPort: 8080
  httpGateway:
    options:
      healthCheck:
        path: /any-path-you-want

apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  labels:
    app: gloo
  name: gateway-proxy-ssl
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  bindAddress: '::'
  bindPort: 8443
  httpGateway:
    options:
      healthCheck:
        path: /any-path-you-want
  proxyNames:
  - gateway-proxy
  ssl: true
  useProxyProto: false

To test the health check, drain the Envoy connections by sending an HTTP POST request to the Envoy admin port on <envoy-ip>:<admin-addr>/healthcheck/fail. This port defaults to 19000.
Send a request to the health check path. Because Envoy is in a draining state, the 503 Service Unavailable message is returned.
```
curl $(glooctl proxy url)/<path>
```