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1.18.x
Traffic management
Health checks
If you are interested in trying out Gloo Gateway with the Kubernetes Gateway API, check out Solo Enterprise for kgateway. This version adds enterprise functionality on top of the kgateway open source project.

Gateway health checks

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Enable a health check plugin on your gateway proxy to respond with common HTTP codes.
About

Gloo Gateway includes an HTTP health checking plug-in that you can enable for a gateway proxy 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

  1. Follow the Get started guide to install Gloo Gateway, set up a gateway resource, and deploy the httpbin sample app.
  2. Get the external address of the gateway and save it in an environment variable.
    export INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS=$(kubectl get svc -n gloo-system gloo-proxy-http -o jsonpath="{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0]['hostname','ip']}")
echo $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS  
    kubectl port-forward deployment/gloo-proxy-http -n gloo-system 8080:8080
Configure a health check on a gateway

  1. Create an HTTPListenerOption resource to configure a health check path for the HTTP or HTTPS listener on the gateway. You can define any path, such as /check/healthz.
    kubectl apply -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: HttpListenerOption
metadata:
  name: healthcheck
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  targetRefs:
  - group: gateway.networking.k8s.io
    kind: Gateway
    name: http
  options:
    healthCheck:
      path: <path>
EOF
  2. To test the health check, drain the Envoy connections by sending an HTTP POST request to the /healthcheck/fail endpoint of the Envoy admin port.
    1. Port-forward the gloo-gateway-http deployment on port 19000.
      kubectl port-forward deploy/gloo-proxy-http -n gloo-system 19000 &
    2. Send an HTTP POST request to the /healthcheck/fail endpoint. This causes Envoy connections to begin draining.
      curl -X POST 127.0.0.1:19000/healthcheck/fail
  3. Send a request to the health check path. Because Envoy is in a draining state, the 503 Service Unavailable message is returned.
    curl -i $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS:8080/<path>
    curl -i localhost:8080/<path>
  4. After you finish testing, resume Envoy connections by sending an HTTP POST request to the /healthcheck/ok endpoint of the Envoy admin port.
    curl -X POST 127.0.0.1:19000/healthcheck/ok
  5. Send another request to the health check path. Because Envoy is operating normally, the 200 OK message is returned.
    curl -i $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS:8080/<path>
    curl -i localhost:8080/<path>
  6. Stop port-forwarding the gloo-gateway-http deployment.
    lsof -ti:19000 | xargs kill -9
Cleanup

You can optionally remove the resources that you set up as part of this guide.
kubectl delete HttpListenerOption healthcheck -n gloo-system
Upstream health checks