Apache Service Startup Issue in GitLab Pipeline

I encountered a problem in my GitLab pipeline when running a container with an Apache service. It failed because Apache was not operational when the pipeline proceeded. I solved it by adding a 60-second sleep in the pipeline. Is there a way to resolve this without hardcoding the sleep?

I attempted to address it using a health check in the Dockerfile, but it seems to be the wrong approach. How do you handle such situations?

stage code :

test_job:
  stage: test
  image: docker:20.10.16
  services:
    - docker:20.10.16-dind
  tags:
    - shell
  script:
    - docker login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD $CI_REGISTRY
    - docker run -d -p 80:80 --env APP_ENV=$APP_ENV --env APP_DEBUG=$APP_DEBUG --name $CONTAINER_NAME $CONTAINER_IMAGE_NAME
    - sleep 60
    - curl http://localhost:80
    - docker stop $CONTAINER_NAME
    - docker container rm $CONTAINER_NAME

Part of dockerfile where I'm trying to do what is described :

CMD composer install && \
    chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/config/autogenerated && \
    chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/var && \
    yarn install && \
    yarn encore production && \
    apache2-foreground
    
HEALTHCHECK --interval=10s --timeout=10s --retries=12 \
  CMD curl -f http://localhost:80 || exit 1

Solution

Is there a way to resolve this without hardcoding the sleep?

Typically, you pollingly wait until the server responds.

- while ! curl http://localhost:80; do sleep 1; done

You could code a little bit of bash to add a timeout, but I am super lazy and use timeout:

- timeout 60 bash -c 'while ! curl http://localhost:80; do sleep 1; done'

or, not to be inside quotes, with exported function:

- f() { while ! curl http://localhost:80; do sleep 1; done; }; export -f f; timeout 60 bash -c f

Real life example from clickhouse.