How to Implement Liveness and Readiness Probes in Go

Kubernetes Containers
2026-04-17T12:05:42+00:00
Implement liveness and readiness probes in Go by creating HTTP endpoints that return 200 OK and configuring your orchestrator to monitor them.

Implement liveness and readiness probes by exposing two HTTP endpoints that return 200 OK when the application is healthy or ready to serve traffic. Add handlers for /healthz (liveness) and /readyz (readiness) in your main package, then configure your container orchestrator to call them.

package main

import (
	"log"
	"net/http"
)

func main() {
	// Liveness probe: returns 200 if the app is running
	http.HandleFunc("/healthz", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
		w.WriteHeader(http.StatusOK)
	})

	// Readiness probe: returns 200 if the app is ready to accept traffic
	http.HandleFunc("/readyz", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
		// Add logic here to check dependencies (DB, cache, etc.)
		w.WriteHeader(http.StatusOK)
	})

	log.Println("Server starting on :8080")
	log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil))
}

In your Kubernetes deployment YAML, configure the probes:

livenessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /healthz
    port: 8080
  initialDelaySeconds: 5
  periodSeconds: 10

readinessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /readyz
    port: 8080
  initialDelaySeconds: 5
  periodSeconds: 5