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.
podman builds an OCI image by default and drops Docker's HEALTHCHECK instruction,
so the container had no health at all and the play failed waiting for one. The
check is now declared on the docker_container task - node is in the image and the
exec form needs no shell quoting - which is both what operators see in docker ps
and what an orchestrator would use.
The wait still asks the app directly rather than reading State.Health, because a
container that already exists is only rebuilt when the image tag changes or when
-e recreate_container=true is passed, and a wait must not depend on a container
attribute an existing one may not have.
The first real deploy left the site on 502 and this is why. podman builds an OCI
image by default and drops the Docker HEALTHCHECK instruction, so the app
container has no State.Health at all; the role waited on that field, exhausted
its retries and failed the play, so the caddy role never ran and Caddy kept
proxying menu.hopsngrains.com to the old nginx container that is now gone.
The wait now asks the app itself: docker exec node -e fetch /healthz, which needs
no healthcheck and no DNS. And because the address may still be claimed by the
snippet the retired nginx-menu playbook wrote, the caddy role drops that marker
before writing its own - two blocks for one address make Caddy refuse the config,
and a refused reload quietly leaves the old proxy in place.
check-site also asked for the font the old design used, so it would have failed a
healthy site; it checks one we ship.
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