Ask HN: How to suggest '/.well-known/health' as a standard?

2 points by molf ↗ HN
Currently I'm working on a project that would benefit from a standard, reserved URL to check if a web service is available and working correctly or not. It should not conflict with typical website URLs.

I know that the /.well-known/ prefix is reserved [1] for such URL endpoints, but it seems there is standard for health checks yet.

What I'd like to exist is simply:

- A standard URL, say '/.well-known/health', that is reserved to respond to HTTP(S) health checks.

- This URL should respond with a HTTP status code 2xx if healthy, anything else (including network errors) is considered unhealthy.

That's it!

How should I make this happen? I guess I could write a document that describes this, but where should I put it? How should I get attention from the right organisations/people to make this happen? Any suggestions how to make this happen?

I think having this would be extremely useful, also for cloud load balancers, Docker containers, Kubernetes deployments, etc. I've noticed many projects tend to use /health or /healthz as defaults, which is 1) not standardised AFAIK and 2) probably a bit risky if you have no control over all URLs your service responds to, since you could accidentally mask a legitimate URL.

[1]: https://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-uris.xhtml

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