Custom Health Check Endpoints for Laravel: Beyond 200 OK

Every Laravel application ships with a default route that returns a 200 OK response. It tells you the web server is running. It tells you PHP is alive. And it tells you absolutely nothing about whether your application is actually healthy. A returning customer can't complete checkout if your Redis connection dropped. Your API consumers get cryptic 500 errors when the database connection pool is exhausted. Your queue workers silently stopped processing jobs three hours ago, and nobody noticed bec