Docker Healthcheck Values for Laravel Projects

Sep 22, 2025 docker laravel linux misc-web mysql nginx php

Docker provides the HEALTHCHECK instruction for Dockerfiles and Docker Compose files.

While not absolutely required, configuring these can make your IDE and environment more robust and verbose.

Here’s what I use with some common containers in Laravel projects.

These all can be defined in your Dockerfile or your docker-compose.yml - check the documentation for the proper syntax.

PHP-FPM When using a PHP-FPM image, specifically an Alpine Linux PHP-FPM image, use this HEALTHCHECK

HEALTHCHECK --start-period=2s CMD pgrep -f php-fpm\:\.pool | grep . || exit 1

In this version, I’m waiting 2 seconds, then running a command with the default HEALTHCHECK loop time of 5s intervals and 30s timeouts. Simply, look for the fpm pool - or exit with an error code.

MySQL For my MySQL image, I will generally specify this is the docker-compose.yml file. You can then use your credentials you defined above.

healthcheck:
  test: mysqladmin ping -h 127.0.0.1 -u $$MYSQL_USER --password=$$MYSQL_PASSWORD
  start_period: 3s
  timeout: 2s
  retries: 50

This defines the intervals and the timeouts. Then, you can see that the mysqladmin binary runs a ping command with the credentials. If this pings, it passes, and then it’s alive.

Redis For my Redis Alpine-based container, I define a Docker compose entry like this:

healthcheck:
  test: redis-cli --raw incr ping

Simply using the redis-cli binary that is included to ping the instance.

NGinx For Alpine NGinx containers, I use the following HEALTHCHECK.

HEALTHCHECK --start-period=2s CMD wget -O /dev/null -q -T 2 http://127.0.0.1/robots.txt || exit 1

This tells the container to use wget to retrieve the local IP addresses’ robots.txt file (or any file you know that exists and is served by NGinx). If it doesn’t serve, exit with an error code. Otherwise, it’s healthy.