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Docker Compose: depends_on and Health Checks That Actually Protect Startup (2026)

DEV Community·David Tio·22 days ago
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Quick one-liner: restart: unless-stopped brings containers back, but it cannot make startup safe. This episode fixes startup races with healthcheck and depends_on: condition: service_healthy . 🤔 Why This Matters In episode 9, we hit a painful failure pattern. The app started before Postgres was actually ready. Migration failed once, then the app kept restarting into a broken state. docker compose ps looked fine, users still saw failures. That is the key difference between these two ideas: Restart policy answers: what to do after a container exits. Health check answers: is this service actually ready to serve traffic. If you want reliable startup, you need both concepts. In this post we focus on readiness. ✅ Prerequisites Ep 1-9 completed. You are comfortable with Compose files, multi-service stacks, and restart policies. You can run commands on sysadmin@levellingdocker where rootless Docker is already configured.…

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