✅ Allgood - Rails gem for health checks

Add quick, simple, and beautiful health checks to your Rails application via a /healthcheck page.

Use it for smoke testing, to make sure your app is healthy and functioning as expected.

How it works

allgood allows you to define custom health checks / smoke tests (as in: can the Rails app connect to the DB, are there any new users in the past 24 hours, are they actually using the app, etc.) in a very intuitive way that reads just like English.

It provides a /healthcheck endpoint that displays the results in a beautiful page.

You can then use that endpoint to monitor the health of your application via UptimeRobot, Pingdom, etc. These services will load your /healthcheck page every few minutes, so all checks will be run when UptimeRobot fetches the page.

allgood aims to provide developers with peace of mind by answering the question "is production okay?" at a glance.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'allgood'

Then run bundle install.

After installing the gem, you need to mount the /healthcheck route and define your health checks in a config/allgood.rb file.

Mount the /healthcheck route

In your config/routes.rb file, mount the Allgood engine:

mount Allgood::Engine => '/healthcheck'

You can now navigate to /healthcheck to see the health check results.

The /healthcheck page returns HTTP codes:

• 200 OK if all checks are successful
• 503 Service Unavailable error otherwise

Services like UptimeRobot pick up these HTTP codes, which makes monitoring easy.

Kamal: allgood can also be used as a replacement for the default /up Rails action, to make Kamal check things like if the database connection is healthy when deploying your app's containers. Just change allgood's mounting route to /up instead of /healthcheck, or configure Kamal to use the allgood route.

Tip

If you're using Kamal with allgood, container deployment will fail if any defined checks fail, without feedback from Kamal on what went wrong. Your containers will just not start, and you'll get a generic error message. To avoid this, you can either keep the allgood.rb file very minimal (e.g., only check for active DB connection, migrations up to date, etc.) so the app deployment is likely to succeed, or you can use the default /up route for Kamal, and then mount allgood on another route for more advanced business-oriented checks. What you want to avoid is your app deployment failing because of usage-dependent or business-oriented checks, like your app not deploying because it didn't get any users in the past hour, or something like that.

Configure your health checks

Create a file config/allgood.rb in your Rails application. This is where you'll define your health checks. Here's a simple example:

# config/allgood.rb

check "We have an active database connection" do
  make_sure ActiveRecord::Base.connection.connect!.active?
end

allgood will run all checks upon page load, and will show "Check passed" or "Check failed" next to it. That's it – add as many health checks as you want!

Here's my default config/allgood.rb file that should work for most Rails applications, feel free to use it as a starting point:

# config/allgood.rb

check "We have an active database connection" do
  make_sure ActiveRecord::Base.connection.connect!.active?
end

check "Database can perform a simple query" do
  make_sure ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("SELECT 1").any?
end

check "Database migrations are up to date" do
  make_sure ActiveRecord::Migration.check_all_pending! == nil
end

check "Disk space usage is below 90%" do
  usage = `df -h / | tail -1 | awk '{print $5}' | sed 's/%//'`.to_i
  expect(usage).to_be_less_than(90)
end

check "Memory usage is below 90%" do
  usage = `free | grep Mem | awk '{print $3/$2 * 100.0}' | cut -d. -f1`.to_i
  expect(usage).to_be_less_than(90)
end

I've also added an example config/allgood.rb file in the examples folder, with very comprehensive checks for a Rails 8+ app, that you can use as a starting point.

Important

Make sure you restart the Rails server (bin/rails s) every time you modify the config/allgood.rb file for the changes to apply – the allgood config is only loaded once when the Rails server starts.

The allgood DSL

As you can see, there's a very simple DSL (Domain-Specific Language) you can use to define health checks.

It reads almost like natural English, and allows you to define powerful yet simple checks to make sure your app is healthy.

For example, you can specify a custom human-readable success / error message for each check, so you don't go crazy when things fail and you can't figure out what the check expected output was:

check "Cache is accessible and functioning" do
  Rails.cache.write('allgood_test', 'ok')
  make_sure Rails.cache.read('allgood_test') == 'ok', "The `allgood_test` key in the cache should contain `'ok'`"
end

Other than checking for an active database connection, it's useful to check for business-oriented metrics, such as whether your app has gotten any new users in the past 24 hours (to make sure your # flow is not broken), check whether there have been any new posts / records created recently (to make sure your users are performing the actions you'd expect them to do in your app), check for recent purchases, check for external API connections, check whether new records contain values within expected range, etc.

Some business health check examples that you'd need to adapt to the specifics of your particular app:

# Adapt these to your app specifics

check "There's been new #s in the past 24 hours" do
  count = User.where(created_at: 24.hours.ago..Time.now).count
  expect(count).to_be_greater_than(0)
end

check "The last created Purchase has a valid total" do
  last_purchase = Purchase.order(created_at: :desc).limit(1).first
  make_sure last_purchase.total.is_a?(Numeric), "Purchase total should be a number"
  expect(last_purchase.total).to_be_greater_than(0)
end

Available check methods

• make_sure(condition, message = nil): Ensures that the given condition is true.
• expect(actual).to_eq(expected): Checks if the actual value equals the expected value.
• expect(actual).to_be_greater_than(expected): Checks if the actual value is greater than the expected value.
• expect(actual).to_be_less_than(expected): Checks if the actual value is less than the expected value.

Please help us develop by adding more expectation methods in the Expectation class!

Run checks only in specific environments or under certain conditions

You can also make certain checks run only in specific environments or under certain conditions. Some examples:

# Only run in production
check "There have been new user #s in the past hour", only: :production do
  make_sure User.where(created_at: 1.hour.ago..Time.now).count.positive?
end

# Run in both staging and production
check "External API is responsive", only: [:staging, :production] do
  # ...
end

# Run everywhere except development
check "A SolidCable connection is active and healthy", except: :development do
  # ...
end

# Using if with a direct boolean
check "Feature flag is enabled", if: ENV['FEATURE_ENABLED'] == 'true' do
  # ...
end

# Using if with a Proc for more complex conditions
check "Complex condition", if: -> { User.count > 1000 && User.last.created_at < 10.minutes.ago } do
  # ...
end

# Override default timeout (in seconds) for specific checks
# By default, each check has a timeout of 10 seconds
check "Slow external API", timeout: 30 do
  # ...
end

# Combine multiple conditions
check "Complex check",
      only: :production,
      if: -> { User.count > 1000 },
      timeout: 15 do
  # ...
end

Rate Limiting Expensive Checks

For expensive operations (like testing paid APIs), you can limit how often checks run:

# Run expensive checks a limited number of times
check "OpenAI is responding with a valid LLM message", run: "2 times per day" do
  # expensive API call
end

check "Analytics can be processed", run: "4 times per hour" do
  # expensive operation
end

Important notes:

• Rate limits reset at the start of each period (hour/day)
• The error state persists between rate-limited runs
• Rate-limited checks show clear feedback about remaining runs and next reset time

When a check is skipped due to its conditions not being met, it will appear in the healthcheck page with a skip emoji (⏭️) and a clear explanation of why it was skipped.

Note: the allgood health check dashboard has an automatic dark mode, based on the system's appearance settings.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/rameerez/allgood. Our code of conduct is: just be nice and make your mom proud of what you do and post online.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.