Standalone Backend

January 29, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Standalone Backend

Blaze comes as a web application which needs one Docker volume to store its data.

Volume

docker volume create blaze-data

Blaze

docker run -d --name blaze -p 8080:8080 -v blaze-data:/app/data samply/blaze:{{ tag }}@{{ digest }}

Blaze should log something like this:

2023-06-09T08:30:21.134Z b45689460ff3 main INFO [blaze.system:181] - Set log level to: info
2023-06-09T08:30:21.155Z b45689460ff3 main INFO [blaze.system:44] - Try to read blaze.edn ...
2023-06-09T08:30:21.173Z b45689460ff3 main INFO [blaze.system:160] - Use storage variant standalone
2023-06-09T08:30:21.174Z b45689460ff3 main INFO [blaze.system:171] - Feature OpenID Authentication disabled
...
2023-06-09T08:30:30.079Z b45689460ff3 main INFO [blaze.server:33] - Start main server on port 8080
2023-06-09T08:30:30.122Z b45689460ff3 main INFO [blaze.server:33] - Start metrics server on port 8081
2023-06-09T08:30:30.126Z b45689460ff3 main INFO [blaze.core:67] - JVM version: 25.0.1
2023-06-09T08:30:30.126Z b45689460ff3 main INFO [blaze.core:68] - Maximum available memory: 1738 MiB
2023-06-09T08:30:30.126Z b45689460ff3 main INFO [blaze.core:69] - Number of available processors: 2
2023-06-09T08:30:30.126Z b45689460ff3 main INFO [blaze.core:70] - Successfully started ๐Ÿ”ฅ Blaze version {{ tag }} in 9.0 seconds

To test connectivity, query the health endpoint:

curl http://localhost:8080/health

After that please note that the FHIR RESTful API is available under http://localhost:8080/fhir. A good start is to query the CapabilityStatement of Blaze using jq to select only the software key of the JSON output:

curl -H 'Accept:application/fhir+json' -s http://localhost:8080/fhir/metadata | jq .software

that should return:

{
  "name": "Blaze",
  "version": "{{ tag }}"
}

Blaze will be configured through environment variables which are documented here.

Docker Compose

A Docker Compose file looks like this:

services:
  blaze:
    image: "samply/blaze:{{ tag }}@{{ digest }}"
    environment:
      JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: "-Xmx2g"
    ports:
    - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
    - "blaze-data:/app/data"
    healthcheck:
      test: [ "CMD", "wget", "--spider", "http://localhost:8080/health" ]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5
      start_period: 30s
volumes:
  blaze-data:

Health Check

The command wget is available and can be used for implementing a health check on the /health endpoint which is separate from the /fhir endpoint.

Caution

The command curl was never officially available in the Blaze backend image. It will be removed in version 1.6. Please migrate to use wget.