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

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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!

No source file or test is named. Start by reproducing the behavior with make run-services while Redis is unavailable, then trace the Celery startup entry point and its Redis connection handling. Done requires an agreed startup behavior and a clear diagnostic when Redis cannot be reached.