Make the path of web endpoints configurable

[wilkinsona]

Many gateways and load balancers ping a URL and just need a 200 back to consider a server to be a candidate for handling requests. We've also heard of teams that "require" this URL to be /health. Given that all they need is a 200 response, the status endpoint is currently the best fit but it's mapped to /status. We should consider making /health provide the rolled up information about the health of the application and making /status provide detailed information.

[snicoll]

So the argument is about the size of the body? IMO it feels weird that something named status returns the full information while health returns only something named "status".

[wilkinsona]

No, I think it's more an argument about security. If we leave things as they are and a load balancer requires the use of /health then the balancer either has to authenticate or you have to open up all of the information exposed by /health to everyone.

[snicoll]

OK but let's keep #8685 on the radar. If we do this, we'd offer /status/{name} rather than /health/{name}. Given the structure of the reply and what a "status" is vs. what "health" means, it looks completely backwards to me.

[philwebb]

I think /health is the more common URL so perhaps that should be the one reveals the least. I'd also be quite keen on bringing the names closer together. How about /heath and /healthdetails ?

[snicoll]

If we want to do that, we have no choice IMO, status should go away and should be renamed to something that states it provides additional details. It is a shame because I think the current names are just about right (I am not a huge fan of /healthdetails and an HealhDetailsEndpoint), this
constraint of having the existing endpoint showing only the status is messing things up :(

Can we reconsider perhaps? We want to use 2.0 to fix things and I believe this is one of them.

[wilkinsona]

@snicoll What do you want to reconsider?

[bclozel]

Agree, both /status and /health names are right and logically we should just swap them. But this will a real problem for environments running both Spring Boot 1.x and 2.x.

So my vote goes to /status going away and keeping /health for the basic information. As for the additional endpoint, /healthdetails is not perfect, but at least it gives you the impression that you'll get "more of the same"; which is exactly what we're trying to do.

I'm still nervous about moving things there; we're basically making a backwards incompatible change not for the load-balancers, but for the APMs using that endpoint to get the details.

[snicoll]

Reconsider swapping them. The naming is right now IMO so I'd really like to keep things as they are now.

[philwebb]

Since we're pretty much all agreed that /application/status and /application/health are logical paths, perhaps we should fix the "problem" a different way? Can we re-instate the ability to change the paths that endpoints are mapped to? It doesn't need to be in properties, perhaps a strategy bean that the user can register?

[wilkinsona]

I don't even think it would be so bad if we supported it via the properties now, particularly if we moved them beneath web to make it clear that JMX was unaffected: endpoints.<id>.web.path.

We definitely don't want to reintroduce support for changing the ID which had the side-effect of changing the path.

[snicoll]

This isn't my preferred option as well. Hopefully systems can adapt over time to /status.

[wilkinsona]

@snicoll Did you mean this is my preferred option?

[snicoll]

Yes sorry. The auto-correct on my phone decided to write isn't 😕

[wilkinsona]

I've retitled the issue for the preferred approach which is to allow a web endpoint's path to be configured

[snicoll]

We need to be careful no to change the mapping for CloudFoundry as that support expects the standard paths. We have a determinePath in WebAnnotationEndpointDiscoverer that will need to change to use the configured option and it sounds like the good place to override the behaviour in that case to always use the id (Right now we need to create a discoverer to avoid filtering out the endpoints the user may have disabled on the regular paths so an override should work there).