This util is designed to be used with https://github.com/gliderlabs/registrator. There's a seemingly-undocumented feature which allows you to specify consul health checks which execute check-cmd on the consul host, passing in the containerid and exposedport as arguments. This allows the service container (e.g. redis etc) to provide the healthcheck logic, without having to copy scripts into the consul container.

Specify SERVICE_CHECK_CMD as an environment variable to the (redis) container, and have this be the full path to a script. The script will be passed the exposedport as the only argument.