Celery starts even when Redis is unavailable, leading to confusing retry loop

[chinmaydave]

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Hi! While setting up Kolibri Studio locally on macOS, I noticed a runtime behavior that might be confusing for contributors and potentially brittle in dev environments.

When running make run-services, Celery starts successfully even if the Redis container fails to start (e.g., due to Docker credential issues). Celery then enters an infinite retry loop with errors like:

Cannot connect to redis://localhost:6379/0: Connection refused

One of the following could make this clearer and easier to diagnose:

Fail fast on startup if Redis is unreachable, with a clear error explaining that Redis must be running before starting Celery.

Preflight dependency check (e.g., ping Redis once before worker startup) and exit with a helpful message if it fails.

Single explicit error log that distinguishes “Redis not running” from general Celery connectivity errors, instead of entering a long retry loop.

I’d be happy to work on a small, targeted change in this area (e.g., an early connectivity check or clearer startup error) if this aligns with the project’s direction.

Thanks!