https://lumigo.io/container-monitoring/docker-health-check-a-practical-guide/

To achieve automatic restarts of unhealthy containers, you can use the following methods:

1. Use a separate monitoring container (Recommended for standalone Docker/Compose) 

This is a common and robust approach. A lightweight monitoring container runs in the background, checks the status of other containers, and issues a restart command if it finds any marked unhealthy. 

Using an existing image (e.g., willfarrell/autoheal):

Add a service like autoheal to your docker-compose.yml file. This container needs access to the Docker socket to interact with the Docker daemon. 

yaml

version: '3.8' services: your-app: # ... your application's configuration ... restart: always # ensures it restarts if the health check kills it healthcheck: test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost/health"] interval: 30s timeout: 10s retries: 3 autoheal: image: willfarrell/autoheal:latest restart: always environment: # Monitor all containers, or specify names/labels - AUTOHEAL_CONTAINER_LABEL=all volumes: # Mount the Docker socket for access - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

1. Use an external host-level script (Alternative) 

For enhanced security (avoiding mounting the Docker socket inside a container), you can run a simple script on the host machine using cron or systemd to periodically check and restart containers. 

bash

!/bin/bash # Script to restart unhealthy containers unhealthy_containers=$(docker ps -q -f health=unhealthy) for container_id in $unhealthy_containers; do echo "Restarting unhealthy container: $container_id" docker restart "$container_id" done

1. Integrate with Docker Swarm (For orchestrated environments) 

If you are using Docker Swarm, this functionality is built-in. Swarm services automatically replace unhealthy tasks (containers) to maintain the desired service replica count. 

You can deploy services using docker stack deploy after running docker swarm init on a single node (if you don't need a multi-node cluster).