Awesome

Healer

Automatically stops or restarts docker containers that report themselves unhealthy.

Why is this needed?

The ability to automatically restart failed containers is built in to Docker itself. But what if the container is still running but doesn't work properly anymore?

If you're using Kubernetes, you can configure a health check and have Kubernetes restart unhealthy containers for you.

But if you're using AWS ECS, this behavior applies only to containers that are part of an ELB target group. Containers that sit behind this layer (in a typical microservice architecture) do not benefit from this. (Update: AWS ECS now supports restarts on all containers, so you no longer need healer with ECS.)

How to use

Healer uses Docker's built-in health functionality (see the docs). When it sees that a container is unhealthy, it will either ignore the event, stop the container, or restart the container. The action taken depends on the value of the HEALING_ACTION environment variable set for the monitored container. HEALING_ACTION can be set to NONE, STOP, or RESTART.

There is no limit on the number of containers that Healer can monitor.

Example usage

Start Healer:

docker run -d --volume=/var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock somarat/healer:latest  

Start monitored container:

docker run -e "HEALING_ACTION=RESTART" \
  --health-interval=10s \
  --health-cmd="curl -I --silent --fail localhost:8080 || exit 1" \
  myimage:latest

In this case Healer will restart the monitored container if its health check fails.