Running with Docker

In the Healthchecks source code, /docker/ directory, you can find a sample configuration for running the project with Docker and Docker Compose.

Note: For the sake of simplicity, the sample configuration starts a single database node and a single web server node, both on the same host. It does not handle TLS termination.

Getting Started

  • Grab the Healthchecks source code from the GitHub repository.
  • Copy docker/.env.example to docker/.env and add your configuration in it. As a minimum, set the following fields:
    • DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL – the "From:" address for outbound emails
    • EMAIL_HOST – the SMTP server
    • EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD – the SMTP password
    • EMAIL_HOST_USER – the SMTP username
    • SECRET_KEY – secures HTTP sessions, set to a random value

  • Create and start containers:

    $ cd docker
$ docker-compose up

  • Create a superuser:

    $ docker-compose run web /opt/healthchecks/manage.py createsuperuser

  • Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser and log in with the credentials from the previous step.

uWSGI Configuration

The reference Dockerfile uses uWSGI as the WSGI server. You can configure uWSGI by setting UWSGI_... environment variables in docker/.env. For example, to disable HTTP request logging, set:

UWSGI_DISABLE_LOGGING=1

Read more about configuring uWSGI in uWSGI documentation.

TLS Termination

If you plan to expose your Healthchecks instance to the public internet, make sure you put a TLS-terminating reverse proxy in front of it.

Important: This Dockerfile uses UWSGI, which relies on the X-Forwarded-Proto header to determine if a request is secure or not. Make sure your TLS-terminating reverse proxy:

  • Discards the X-Forwarded-Proto header sent by the end user.
  • Sets the X-Forwarded-Proto header value to match the protocol of the original request ("http" or "https").

For example, in NGINX you can use the $scheme variable like so:

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;