Two changes to how credentials are stored and distributed.
1. common.yaml now exists.
The renderer has always concatenated common.yaml then <env>.yaml, host winning,
and the README has always documented common.yaml with a checkmark. The file was
never created. So every value shared by prod and beta was duplicated in both
vaults, free to drift apart with nothing to detect it.
16 values move to common.yaml: VAPID keypair, metrics token, IndexNow key,
REGISTRY_TOKEN, the S3 endpoint/bucket and both S3 keypairs, plus shared config.
5 stay per-host because their values genuinely differ (APP_CPUS, DB_CPUS,
DB_MEMORY, WORKERS, THERMOGRAPH_BASE_URL). 8 exist only on prod — the Discord
and mail credentials, which beta does not have at all.
Three more are held back deliberately despite being identical today:
POSTGRES_PASSWORD, THERMOGRAPH_AUTH_SECRET, THERMOGRAPH_DATABASE_URL. These are
the credentials that let one environment act as another, and beta is the more
exposed box — it serves public Forgejo and Grafana. They match only because beta
was seeded from prod. Keeping them per-host costs one line each and preserves
the ability to diverge; putting them in common.yaml would encode the equivalence
as intentional and make breaking it a migration rather than an edit. Reasoning
recorded in the vault README, since a future reader will otherwise "fix" it.
Done without any plaintext leaving prod: ciphertext was shipped up, decrypted
against the host's age key, recombined, re-encrypted, and shipped back. The
consolidation refuses to write unless it has proved merged(common + env) equals
the original env vault exactly — same keys, same values — and re-verifies from
the written files afterwards. Both checks passed for prod and beta.
2. render_thermograph_secrets no longer fails open.
One `return 0` covered two different situations: "this host is not configured
for SOPS" (true of the LAN dev box, and correct to succeed) and "this host IS
configured but its vault is not where we looked". The second is a failure, and
returning 0 made it a silent no-op wearing a success code — a deploy would
report success having rendered nothing, and the host would keep serving whatever
/etc/thermograph.env already held, including after a rotation.
The likely cause is passing the wrong root: the function wants the directory
containing deploy/secrets, which on the hosts is /opt/thermograph/infra, not
/opt/thermograph. That mistake looked exactly like "not configured here", which
is why it went unnoticed. It now exits 1 and names the probable cause.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0182KTMrsTHJc3TcewCatJFY
Prod DB dumps and Forgejo (db + data volume) are now copied off-box to the
era5-thermograph S3 bucket, age-encrypted to the vault recipient so the host
age key at /etc/thermograph/age.key decrypts them for restore. Nothing plaintext
leaves the box; no local intermediate (streamed via age | rclone rcat).
ops-cron: the prod pg_dump job gains an off-box push; a new forgejo-backup job
dumps Forgejo's Postgres + tars its data volume on beta (the git host had NO
backup at all). 30-day off-box retention on both. S3 creds are Forgejo Actions
secrets (S3_ENDPOINT/BUCKET/ACCESS_KEY/SECRET_KEY), mirrored into the SOPS vault
(prod.yaml/beta.yaml) for host-side use. Contabo needs path-style addressing.
Adds deploy/backup/README.md with the DR restore runbook.
