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.
Reverts the explicit subnets: the pools were freed by deleting five networks, so
the network role is back to its single idempotent task - ensure the network
exists and Caddy is on it - and the Sites no longer declare a subnet. The
deployment readme keeps the note that a new Site needs a config, and therefore a
new tag, but no longer asks for a free /24.
If the pools fill up again the failure is recognisable: 'all predefined address
pools have been fully subnetted', and the choices are deleting stale networks or
declaring a subnet per Site.
The deploy failed on hngmohali with 'all predefined address pools have been
fully subnetted': every 172.17-172.30/16 is in use, 172.31/16 is the host's own
VPC so Docker will not allocate from it, and all sixteen 192.168.0-240/20 blocks
are taken. Docker therefore refuses a network created without a subnet.
Each Site now names a free network_subnet (10.210.0.0/16, one /24 each), the role
looks the network up first and only creates it when it is absent and with that
subnet, and it fails with an explanation when a Site declares none. Existing
networks are left alone, because Docker cannot change a subnet in place and the
Sites already running have theirs. The test checks every Site declares one, and
the deployment readme says a new Site needs a free subnet.
deploy.sh now deploys every Site by default, with SITE=<name> to narrow it, which
is what the local edit was reaching for.
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.
tanshu