Awesome, thank you! That seems to have fixed it.

Just for future reference for others that might run into this issue. I had an action that setup a postgres and a redis service. This was what the service code looked like in my main.yml:

services:
db:
image: postgres:11
ports: ['5432:5432']
options: >-
--health-cmd pg_isready
--health-interval 10s
--health-timeout 5s
--health-retries 5
redis:
image: redis
ports: ['6379:6379']
options: --entrypoint redis-server

It had been running completely fine for a few weeks and then out of the blue the setup of the redis server start failing with the roughly the same issue.

##[error]Failed to initialize, db service is unhealthy.

I came across this post and thought it wasn’t relevant at first. After much testing I tried setting up my redis service through another Action from the marketplace. At that point my **postgres** service started failing with the same message above!

##[error]Failed to initialize, db service is unhealthy.

Roughly following the advice from this thread I added an .env section with passwords, username, and db env variables to my postgres service. It worked! This is what the code looks like now: 

services:
db:
image: postgres:11
env:
POSTGRES\_USER: postgres
POSTGRES\_PASSWORD: postgres
POSTGRES\_DB: postgres
ports: ['5432:5432']
options: >-
--health-cmd pg_isready
--health-interval 10s
--health-timeout 5s
--health-retries 5
redis:
image: redis
ports: ['6379:6379']
options: --entrypoint redis-server

Hope this is helpful for future devs. Also no clue why this suddenly started happening. Nothing changed in my code that would have affected this.

I just had same issue with postgres 11, running fine for weeks then today:  “Failed to initialize, db service is unhealthy”.  Just started about an hour ago.     This is only thing I found on web that discusses this.   Adding the env part worked first time!  Thank you very much!  

Same here, my postgres container stopped working, this fixed it. Thanks!

Hey can you show the changes you have done on script? thanks

That fixed the container step, but in my rails db:prepare step, I was suddenly getting an issue about a missing postgres password.

Make sure to include the env’s:

DATABASE_URL: postgres://postgres:@localhost:5432/test
          PGUSER: postgres
          PGPASSWORD: postgres

for any other step that needs postgres, such as:

bundle exec rails db:prepare

Thank you! This resolved my issue.

It seems that github actions no longer passes the job:env to services, and that you have to replicate the service env vars.

ie, this used to work:

build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgres
      POSTGRES_DB: postgres
services:
  postgres:
    image: postgres:11-alpine
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    options: >-
      --health-cmd pg_isready
      --health-interval 10s
      --health-timeout 5s
      --health-retries 5

but now you have to repeat the env for the service:

build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgres
      POSTGRES_DB: postgres
services:
  postgres:
    image: postgres:11-alpine
    env:
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgres
      POSTGRES_DB: postgres
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    options: >-
      --health-cmd pg_isready
      --health-interval 10s
      --health-timeout 5s
      --health-retries 5

Github: stop making it hard to DRY!!!

Another happy postgres user whose CI action mysteriously stopped working and found this thread. Thanks for getting me running again!

I’d tried all of the suggestions here, but still received the same error.

Maybe it had something to do with me using mysql:5.6 instead of a higher version like I see being used in every snippet.

Anyway, after moving the environment variables to the service, using the MySQL server image did the trick for me:

services:
      mysql:
        image: mysql/mysql-server:5.6
        env:
          MYSQL_USER: testuser
          MYSQL_PASSWORD: testpassword
        options: >-
          --health-cmd "mysql health ping"
          --health-interval 10s
          --health-timeout 10s
          --health-retries 10

Here's what worked for me:

• Check if healthy
• If not healthy, log most recent docker logs

      - name: Check MySQL health status
        id: check_health
        run: |
          echo "Checking MySQL health status..."
          attempt_counter=0
          max_attempts=24
          until [ "$(docker inspect --format="{{.State.Health.Status}}" my_container)" == "healthy" ]; do
            if [ ${attempt_counter} -eq ${max_attempts} ];then
              echo "Max attempts reached"
              exit 1
            fi

            health_status=$(docker inspect --format="{{.State.Health.Status}}" my_container)
            echo "Current MySQL health status: ${health_status}"

            if [ "${health_status}" != "healthy" ]; then
              echo "Displaying last 10 lines from Docker logs:"
              docker logs --tail 10 my_container
            fi

            attempt_counter=$(($attempt_counter+1))
            sleep 5
          done