Missing Health Check

The Problem

Your docker-compose.yml has a depends_on: db directive in the app service.

But depends_on only waits for the db container's process to start. It doesn't wait for Postgres to finish booting up and accepting connections.

If you run docker compose up, your PHP app will start instantly, try to connect to the database, and crash with a "Connection refused" error because Postgres is still initializing its data directory.

To fix this, you must tell Docker how to check if Postgres is healthy, and tell the app to wait for that health status.

What You Need to Fix

Load this challenge:

php artisan challenge:start docker-missing-healthcheck

The docker-compose.yml file is copied to your project root.

1. Add a healthcheck block to the db service. Use pg_isready -U postgres as the test command.
2. Update the depends_on block in the app service. It currently uses the short array syntax (- db). Change it to the object syntax and add condition: service_healthy.

Hints

• A Postgres healthcheck looks like this:

  healthcheck:
    test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U postgres"]
    interval: 5s
    timeout: 5s
    retries: 5

• The long syntax for depends_on looks like this:

  depends_on:
    db:
      condition: service_healthy

Verify

php artisan challenge:verify