Prevent /up healthchecks from appearing in access logs

[jaydrogers]

👉 Describe the problem

• If someone uses the Laravel /up health check, the access logs get noisy with every check.
• Only the default /healthcheck supports ignores sending requests to the access log

👥 Problem evidence & reach

https://x.com/angusmcritchie/status/1818550305363230764

🏆 Proposed Solution

There are two options I see as of now

"Synchronize" The HEALTHCHECK_PATH variable

• HEALTHCHECK_PATH could set all the server configs for NGINX, Apache, Unit, etc
• With this path, it will be in a block that ignores routing to the access log

Add a second block to ignore /up as well

If the above solution becomes to complicated to support, then it is possible to just ignore /up. The only problem is that makes a pretty big assumption that no one will use the /up endpoint in their application.

🥰 Describe the "impact" on users?

This will reduce noisy logs on production machines for people using the Laravel healthcheck endpoint.

💯 How do we validate the problem is solved?

• Health checks continue to work
• Laravel healtchecks to /up do not appear in logs

[angus-mcritchie]

Server Side Up provides a way to add custom startup scripts, so I created my own to ignore Laravel's /up health checks, here's how I did it.

1. Add a .docker/entrypoint.d/15-suppress-laravel-up-logs.sh file to your project.
2. Add COPY --chmod=755 .docker/entrypoint.d/ /etc/entrypoint.d/ to your Dockerfile
3. Add ENV SUPPRESS_LARAVEL_UP_LOGS=true to your Dockerfile

Contents of .docker/entrypoint.d/15-suppress-laravel-up-logs.sh

#!/command/with-contenv sh

if [ "$SUPPRESS_LARAVEL_UP_LOGS" = "true" ]; then
    echo "ℹ️  Suppressing Laravel's /up access logs."

    echo '' >> /etc/apache2/vhost-templates/https.conf
    echo '# Suppress Laravel /up endpoint logs' >> /etc/apache2/vhost-templates/https.conf
    echo 'SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/up$" dontlog' >> /etc/apache2/vhost-templates/https.conf

    echo '' >> /etc/apache2/vhost-templates/http.conf
    echo '# Suppress Laravel /up endpoint logs' >> /etc/apache2/vhost-templates/http.conf
    echo 'SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/up$" dontlog' >> /etc/apache2/vhost-templates/http.conf
else
    echo "ℹ️ Suppressing Laravel's /up access logs is not enabled, enable it by setting SUPPRESS_LARAVEL_UP_LOGS=true."
fi

Nice and clean logs now.

Happy coding 🙏