Summary

The shipped worker healthcheck command vibetuner worker-health cannot reliably complete within a typical Docker healthcheck timeout, because it pays the full CLI bootstrap cost (~5s) before it ever reads the streaq health key. With the scaffolded compose.prod.yml worker healthcheck (timeout: 5s), every probe is killed at the timeout boundary (ExitCode -1) before the check logic runs, so a perfectly healthy worker flaps to unhealthy permanently.

Steps to reproduce

1. Deploy the scaffolded worker with its default healthcheck:

   healthcheck:
     test: ["CMD", "vibetuner", "worker-health"]
     interval: 30s
     timeout: 5s
     retries: 3
     start_period: 40s

2. Worker is genuinely healthy: asyncio loop alive, per-minute cron firing, streaq consumer group pending=0, lag=0, worker_watchdog_timeout=60s active, restart count 0.
3. docker inspect shows the container unhealthy with a long failing streak; healthcheck log entries are ExitCode -1 (timed out), not the command's own output.

Expected vs actual

• Expected: worker-health only needs to read streaq's streaq:{queue}:health:* key — it should return in well under a second, comfortably inside a small timeout.
• Actual: the command first runs the standard CLI/app bootstrap (config load, BlobService init, rate limiter, app-config load, logging setup), which on a real deploy takes ~5s, so it is killed before reaching the health logic.

Suggested fixes (either or both)

1. Make worker-health a lightweight fast-path that skips the heavy app-config / BlobService / rate-limiter initialization and only constructs the minimal Redis client needed to read the streaq health key.
2. Ship the scaffolded worker healthcheck with a timeout that accounts for the current bootstrap cost (e.g. 20s) so it isn't unusable at its own default.

Environment

• vibetuner 10.22.3, observed on a production Docker Compose deploy (restart: unless-stopped, no autoheal sidecar — so the false unhealthy is cosmetic today, but it masks any genuine future unhealthy signal).

Filed by Claude Code.