The fleet on emily is rootless Podman with Quadlet units under
~/.config/containers/systemd and state in ~/podman-data, all behind one shared
Caddy unit. This brings the menus in line instead of leaving them the last
Docker deployment. The build moves with them: podman reads a Containerfile as
readily as a Dockerfile, so the name now says which toolchain is real.
The app is one .container and one .network file. Two details carry it.
UserNS=keep-id maps the image's own node account onto the user that owns the
units, so data/ and site.env stay owned by tanshu: plain tar backups, no
subuids. provision-site-env.sh writes site.env with the same mapping rather
than --user, which under rootless Podman would have produced a subuid-owned
file the app could not read. And the Site registers its own network with Caddy
by writing a drop-in beside caddy.container, so Caddy never lists its upstreams
and never changes when a Site is added. The unit keeps the Docker-era container
name for the scripts and muscle memory that look it up, while the Caddyfile
proxies to a dotless NetworkAlias, because a container name with dots in it is
a liability in DNS.
The unit keeps podman's Pull=missing, so a restart or a reboot never depends on
the registry being reachable, while the play pulls explicitly at deploy time.
That is also where a missing `podman login` for the private registry now fails,
with the instruction, rather than as a unit that will not start.
copy-site-data.sh moves a Site's data across, and is not a plain rsync:
/var/lib/menu.* on monoco belongs to uid 1000 while the ssh user there is 1001,
so the read needs sudo; monoco cannot ssh to emily, so the workstation relays
the tar; and the extraction runs as tanshu on emily, which is what makes the
files land owned by the user keep-id maps the app onto. It proves the copy by
comparing a SHA-256 of the whole tree against the source and checking every
file's owner.
Not yet done: the copies themselves and the DNS move, which need a human.
One image serves every Site, so a new Site is three small files: an inventory
entry, a vars file naming its web address and data root, and a config that seeds
its theme and first category list (baked into the image, which is why a new Site
needs a new tag).
Both reuse the directory their old static menus were served from, and the caddy
role drops the snippet the retired nginx-menu playbook wrote for each hostname,
so a deploy repoints each address at its own container with nothing else to do.
The seeded category lists are a starting point, not a decision: categories, names
and icons are all editable in each Site's own admin. A test now checks the
inventory, config and vars agree for every Site and that no config is orphaned,
because a half-added Site was the obvious way to get this wrong.
The playbook, its roles, its vars and a new inventory now live in ansible/,
beside the app they deploy, the way the other apps on this machine are laid out.
The inventory follows the same shape: one entry per Site, all on the same box,
each naming its own vars file through var_file, so adding a Site is one line and
a file rather than a command-line flag. ansible_host is written as the
resolvable name rather than an ssh alias so the inventory works on any machine.
The image is now built with podman as a multi-arch manifest and pushed to
registry.tanshu.com/menu-admin, mirroring the Makefile used elsewhere on this
machine: build-production, plus build-check and build-check-local for a build
that does not push. deploy.sh runs the checks, builds, pushes, then runs the
playbook for the Site named by SITE, with SKIP_DEPLOY for a push without a
deploy.
ESLint comes out again: this project's typescript@7 has no JavaScript compiler
API, so typescript-eslint cannot install, and linting only the JavaScript was
not worth keeping. Prettier stays, and the README records why ESLint is absent
and what would bring it back.
tanshu