nanny health

Shows the status of every Nanny component that is currently active. Exits 0 if all active components are healthy, 1 if any are unhealthy.

nanny health

What it checks

nanny health checks three things:

Component	Active when	What “healthy” means
Local bridge	`NANNY_BRIDGE_SOCKET` or `NANNY_BRIDGE_PORT` is set	A TCP connection to the bridge succeeds
Network server	`NANNY_BRIDGE_ADDR` is set	A TCP connection to the server address succeeds
Certificates	`~/.nanny/certs/` exists	Cert files are present and not expired

A component that was never started is not checked and does not cause a non-zero exit. nanny health only reports on what is active. This means nanny health run from a regular terminal (outside nanny run) will typically show local bridge: not running — that’s expected. The bridge env vars are injected by nanny run into the child process, not into the terminal that launched it.

Example output

Server running, certs valid:

local bridge  : not running
network server: running  (0.0.0.0:62669)  [plain HTTP]
certs         : valid  (expires 2027-05-01T09:00:00Z)

All components active and healthy (within a governed process):

local bridge  : running
network server: not running
certs         : not found  (run `nanny certs generate`)

Server unreachable:

local bridge  : not running
network server: unreachable  (server.example.com:62669) — connection refused
certs         : valid  (expires 2027-05-01T09:00:00Z)

Exit code is 1 when any active component is unreachable.

Certificate expiry warning

When certs exist and are valid but expire within 30 days, nanny health prints a warning to stderr:

nanny health  : warning — certs expire in 14 day(s). Run `nanny certs rotate` to renew.

The exit code is still 0 — a near-expiry cert is healthy, just worth knowing about.

Use in scripts and health checks

nanny health is designed for scripts, Docker health checks, and Kubernetes liveness probes: Docker:

HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=5s \
  CMD nanny health || exit 1

Shell script:

if ! nanny health; then
  echo "Nanny is not healthy — aborting"
  exit 1
fi

Kubernetes:

livenessProbe:
  exec:
    command: ["nanny", "health"]
  initialDelaySeconds: 5
  periodSeconds: 30

Concepts

SDKs

Guides

CLI

Reference

What it checks

Example output

Certificate expiry warning

Use in scripts and health checks

See also

​What it checks

​Example output

​Certificate expiry warning

​Use in scripts and health checks

​See also

What it checks

Example output

Certificate expiry warning

Use in scripts and health checks

See also