docker-compose healthcheck retry frequency != interval

Unfortunately, this is not possible out of the box.
All the duration set are final. They can't be changed depending on the container state.

However, according to the documentation, the probe does not seem to wait for the start_period to finish before checking your test. The only thing it does is that any failure hapenning during start_period will not be considered as an error.

Below is the sentence that make me think that :

start_period provides initialization time for containers that need time to bootstrap. Probe failure during that period will not be counted towards the maximum number of retries. However, if a health check succeeds during the start period, the container is considered started and all consecutive failures will be counted towards the maximum number of retries.

I encourage you to test if this is really the case as I've never really paid any attention if the healthcheck is tested during the start period or not.
And if it is the case, you can probably increase your start_period if you're unsure about the duration and also increase the interval in order to find a good compromise.

I wrote a script that does this, though I'd rather find a native solution:

#!/bin/shHEALTHCHECK_FILE="/root/.healthchecked"COMMAND=${*?"Usage: healthcheck_retry <COMMAND>"}if [ -r "$HEALTHCHECK_FILE" ]; then  LAST_HEALTHCHECK=$(date -r "$HEALTHCHECK_FILE" +%s)  # FIVE_MINUTES_AGO=$(date -d 'now - 5 minutes' +%s)  FIVE_MINUTES_AGO=$(echo "$(( $(date +%s)-5*60 ))")  echo "Healthcheck file present";  # if (( $LAST_HEALTHCHECK > $FIVE_MINUTES_AGO )); then  if [ $LAST_HEALTHCHECK -gt $FIVE_MINUTES_AGO ]; then    echo "Healthcheck too recent";    exit 0;  fifiif $COMMAND ; then  echo "\"$COMMAND\" succeed: updating file";  touch $HEALTHCHECK_FILE;  exit 0;else  echo "\"$COMMAND\" failed: exiting";  exit 1;fi

Which I use: test: /healthcheck_retry.sh curl -fsS localhost:4000/healthcheck

The pain is that I need to make sure the script is available in every container, so I have to create an extra volume for this:

    image: postgres:11.6-alpine    volumes:      - ./scripts/utils/healthcheck_retry.sh:/healthcheck_retry.sh