
Ask HN: How to suggest '/.well-known/health' as a standard? - molf
Currently I&#x27;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.<p>I know that the &#x2F;.well-known&#x2F; prefix is reserved [1] for such URL endpoints, but it seems there is standard for health checks yet.<p>What I&#x27;d like to exist is simply:<p>- A standard URL, say &#x27;&#x2F;.well-known&#x2F;health&#x27;, that is reserved to respond to HTTP(S) health checks.<p>- This URL should respond with a HTTP status code 2xx if healthy, anything else (including network errors) is considered unhealthy.<p>That&#x27;s it!<p>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&#x2F;people to make this happen? Any suggestions how to make this happen?<p>I think having this would be extremely useful, also for cloud load balancers, Docker containers, Kubernetes deployments, etc. I&#x27;ve noticed many projects tend to use &#x2F;health or &#x2F;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.<p>[1]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iana.org&#x2F;assignments&#x2F;well-known-uris&#x2F;well-known-uris.xhtml
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arkitaip
Have you reached out to the major stake holders, i.e. organizations and people
who have an interest in your proposal and have the resources and connections
to champion it into reality?

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molf
I haven't, I'm not really sure where to start, so any suggestions would be
welcome!

I mostly don't know who this standard would benefit enough to put in any
significant resources. It seems just a small thing that helps everyone...?

