Easily Check if Your YBA Instance is Primary or Standby

Yugabyte’s yba-ctl (the YBA Installer CLI) is a powerful tool for installing and managing YugabyteDB Anywhere (YBA), whether locally or in production. It handles installation, upgrades, service management (start, stop, status, etc.), backups, configuration, and more.

However, when it comes to high availability status, specifically whether a YBA instance is acting as the primary (leader) or standby (follower), yba-ctl currently offers no direct insight via its API.

The Limitation

Even though YBA supports an active-standby high availability (HA) model, yba-ctl doesn’t expose an API endpoint or command that indicates whether the current instance is the HA leader or a standby node. That means operations teams need a way to programmatically check the role of a YBA instance in the cluster..

Enter the Bash Script Solution

That’s where our custom bash script comes into play. By leveraging the YBA REST API endpoint

				
					curl https://<host_or_ip>/api/v1/ha_leader

… you can determine the HA role programmatically and output a clear, human‑friendly message.

Here’s how it works:

• If the response indicates no HA config exists, the script prints:

				
					No HA Config exists

• If the instance is the leader (primary), the script prints:

				
					HA Leader (Primary)

• If the instance is a follower (standby), the script prints:

				
					HA Follower (Standby)

Here’s the full script implementation that accepts a hostname or IP as a parameter (defaulting to 127.0.0.1 if none is provided):

				
					#!/bin/bash

# Usage: ./check_ha_leader.sh [hostname_or_ip]
# Defaults to 127.0.0.1 if no argument is supplied

HOST="${1:-127.0.0.1}"
URL="https://${HOST}/api/v1/ha_leader"

RESPONSE=$(curl -sk "$URL")

if echo "$RESPONSE" | grep -q '"haleader":true'; then
  echo "HA Leader (Primary)"
elif echo "$RESPONSE" | grep -q 'No HA Config exists'; then
  echo "No HA Config exists"
elif echo "$RESPONSE" | grep -q 'HA follower'; then
  echo "HA Follower (Standby)"
else
  echo "Unexpected response: $RESPONSE"
fi

Save the script to a file called check_ha_leader.sh, and make it executable:

				
					chmod +x check_ha_leader.sh

Example Run

				
					./check_ha_leader.sh yba.dev.yugabyte.com
HA Leader (Primary)

Why This Matters

• Operational Clarity: Quickly confirm if an instance is serving as primary or standby without digging through complex logs or dashboards.
• Automation-Friendly: Integrate this script into monitoring systems, deployment pipelines, or failover controls.
• Complements yba-ctl: It fills the gap left by the yba-ctl tool, giving teams the visibility needed to make HA-aware decisions.

By combining the installation and management power of yba-ctl with this API-driven script, you now gain full visibility into your YBA instance roles!

Have Fun!