How to Add Health Check Endpoints in Go

Add a handler to your http.Server that returns a 200 status code to indicate the application is healthy.

package main

import (
	"log"
	"net/http"
)

func main() {
	http.HandleFunc("/health", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
		w.WriteHeader(http.StatusOK)
		w.Write([]byte("OK"))
	})

	log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil))
}

Start your server and verify the endpoint by visiting http://localhost:8080/health.

A health check endpoint is a specific URL your application exposes to tell external systems if it is running correctly. Load balancers and monitoring tools hit this URL regularly; if it returns a success code, they know your app is alive and ready to handle traffic. Think of it like a heartbeat monitor for your software.