# ADR-020: Health Checks and Liveness/Readiness Probes

**Date**: 2025-12-12

**Status**: Proposed

## Context

When the application is containerized (`ADR-014`), the container orchestrator (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker Swarm) needs a way to determine if the application is running correctly. Without this, it cannot manage application lifecycle events like restarts or rolling updates effectively.

## Decision

We will implement dedicated health check endpoints in the Express application.

* A **Liveness Probe** (`/api/health/live`) will return a `200 OK` to indicate the server is running. If it fails, the orchestrator should restart the container.

* A **Readiness Probe** (`/api/health/ready`) will return a `200 OK` only if the application is ready to accept traffic (e.g., database connection is established). If it fails, the orchestrator will temporarily remove the container from the load balancer.

## Consequences

* **Positive**: Enables robust, automated application lifecycle management in a containerized environment. Prevents traffic from being sent to unhealthy or uninitialized application instances.
* **Negative**: Adds a small amount of code for the health check endpoints. Requires configuration in the container orchestration layer.
