Health check endpoints in Flask - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Health Check Endpoints with Flask

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple web service that needs to report its health status. This is common in real-world apps to let monitoring tools check if the service is running well.

🎯 Goal: Create a Flask app with a health check endpoint /health that returns a JSON response showing the service status.

📋 What You'll Learn

Use Flask to create a web app

Create a route /health that returns JSON

Return a JSON object with key status and value "ok"

Set the HTTP status code to 200 for the health check response

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Health check endpoints are used by monitoring systems to check if a web service is running and healthy.

💼 Career

Knowing how to create health check endpoints is important for backend developers and DevOps engineers to ensure service reliability.

1

Set up the Flask app

Import Flask from flask and create a Flask app instance called app.

Flask

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use from flask import Flask and then app = Flask(__name__).

2

Create the health check route

Use the @app.route decorator with the path /health to define a function called health_check.

Flask

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use @app.route('/health') above a function named health_check.

3

Return JSON response with status

Inside the health_check function, import jsonify from flask and return jsonify({'status': 'ok'}).

Flask

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/health')
def health_check():
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use return jsonify({'status': 'ok'}) inside the function.

4

Set HTTP status code to 200 explicitly

Modify the return statement in health_check to return the JSON and the status code 200 as a tuple.

Flask

from flask import Flask, jsonify

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/health')
def health_check():
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Return a tuple with jsonify({'status': 'ok'}) and 200.