name: CoreDNS Health Capabilities
description: >-
  Workflow capabilities exposed by the CoreDNS health and ready plugins for
  Kubernetes liveness and readiness probing and graceful shutdown.
url: https://coredns.io/plugins/health/
version: '1.0'
modified: '2026-04-28'
api: CoreDNS Health API
baseURL: http://localhost:8080
capabilities:
  - name: Liveness Probing
    description: >-
      Probe the /health endpoint to verify the CoreDNS process is alive and
      not in lameduck mode.
    operations:
      - getHealth
    inputs:
      - probe interval
    outputs:
      - HTTP 200 OK when alive
      - HTTP 503 during lameduck shutdown
  - name: Readiness Probing
    description: >-
      Probe the /ready endpoint to verify all CoreDNS plugins implementing
      the Readiness interface have completed initialization.
    operations:
      - getReadiness
    inputs:
      - probe interval
    outputs:
      - HTTP 200 OK when ready
      - HTTP 503 when initializing
  - name: Graceful Shutdown Signaling
    description: >-
      Use lameduck mode to signal load balancers and orchestrators to drain
      traffic before terminating CoreDNS instances.
    operations:
      - getHealth
    inputs:
      - lameduck duration
    outputs:
      - HTTP 503 lameduck response
useCases:
  - name: Kubernetes Liveness Probe
    description: Configure kubelet liveness probes to call /health and restart unhealthy CoreDNS pods.
    capabilities:
      - Liveness Probing
  - name: Kubernetes Readiness Probe
    description: Gate Service traffic on /ready to prevent routing to pods that have not finished initializing.
    capabilities:
      - Readiness Probing
  - name: Rolling Updates
    description: Enable lameduck on SIGTERM to drain DNS traffic during rolling restarts.
    capabilities:
      - Graceful Shutdown Signaling
      - Liveness Probing