Building django-healthkit
How a simple health endpoint for Bidar turned into django-healthkit, a lightweight Django health-check package.
Django
Backend
Packages
DevOps
Aug 9, 2026 · 2 min read
Building django-healthkit
While building Bidar, I needed a simple health endpoint for the projects that Bidar was going to monitor.
At first, it was nothing fancy.
Just a 200 OK response with a small JSON payload:
{
"status": "ok"
}
Then I added the application version.
But I started thinking: what if this endpoint actually told me whether the application was healthy?
That question turned a tiny endpoint into a small side project.
I started building django-healthkit — a simple Django package for checking the health of an application.
The first version is intentionally small. It currently checks the most important infrastructure dependencies I need:
- Database connectivity
- Redis connectivity
The plan is to gradually add more checks, such as:
- CPU usage
- Memory usage
- Disk usage
- More infrastructure and application-level checks
The goal isn't to build another huge monitoring system.
I want django-healthkit to stay simple, lightweight, and useful — something I can plug into Bidar, but also something that could be useful on its own for Django applications or even as a basic health check endpoint for environments like Kubernetes.
What started as a simple:
GET /health/
is slowly becoming a small piece of infrastructure.
And honestly, that's one of the things I like about building software:
sometimes a tiny problem turns into a useful tool.
You can find the package on PyPI.
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