Minimal HTTP Health Check

We, being the company I work for, recently set up a mysql galera cluster and haproxy to load balance connections between the nodes. Haproxy has a mysql health check, but it only logs into the server, and we wanted a bit more than that (galera’s rsync option puts the server that is being synced from in read_only mode). What I didn’t want to do was install apache or similar because I wanted to leave as much of the systems resources available to mysql. I solved the problem with a perl script.

Before I move on, I should mention that I don’t like perl. Other languages, such as Go, provide just as easy of a solution, but perl is installed on pretty much all linux distros, and, therefore, was less setup. The backbone of the script is the HTTP::Simple::Server:CGI package. My version of the script weighs in at a whole 26 lines of code. Here it, mostly, is.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use File::Pid;

{
package MyWebServer;

use HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI;
use base qw(HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI);

    sub handle_request {
        my ($self, $cgi) = @_;
        $isFine = 0;
        //-----
        //do your checking logic here
        //-----
        if($isFine) {
            print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n";
            print $cgi->header;
        } else {
            print "HTTP/1.0 503 Service Unavailable\r\n";
            print $cgi->header;
        }
    }
}

my $pidfile = File::Pid->new();
if(!$pidfile->running) {
    my $server = MyWebServer->new(12345);
    $server->host('YOUR SERVERS IP GOES HERE');
    my $pid = $server->background();
    $pidfile->pid($pid);
    $pidfile->write;
}

The above code checks to see if a running PID for the script exists and exits if it does (the if block towards the bottom). It then sets up the server to listen on part 12345, use whatever port you want. The next line tells it to listen on a specific ip address, I set that from chef as part of the .erb that builds this script, you could pass a parameter to the script if you don’t want to do that ($ARGV[0]). It then creates the server in the background and writes the PID file.

Of course, the real action is in the handle_request function in the package. That function gets called every time the script receives an http request. All mine does, and you could do a lot more here, is collect some information about the state of the server, a bit more on that in a second, and either returns a status of 200 or 503 which is all haproxy cares about. If your load balancer checks for actual content in the response then, you would add some prints after the $cgi->header calls.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the reason we set this up was to discover if the server happens to be in read_only mode. Thus, all my check does it shell out to mysql with a -e option to show global variables, and then runs a regex over that for read_only being set to off.

I’ve also set cron up to run the script ever minute, which is why the PID stuff is in there. Pretty simple really.