thermograph/infra/deploy/forgejo
Emi Griffith 7878763b66
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forgejo: restart the db service on a clean exit, not just on failure
forgejo_db has been at 0/1 replicas since 2026-07-29 01:24 UTC. Postgres hit
an invalid data-directory lock file ("could not open file postmaster.pid ...
performing immediate shutdown because data directory lock file is invalid")
and exited 0. With restart_policy.condition=on-failure, Swarm read the zero
status as successful completion, marked the task Complete, and never
rescheduled it.

The forgejo service itself stayed Up and kept serving its homepage, so the
outage presented as every repository page, the whole API and all CI returning
500 with "dial tcp: lookup db on 127.0.0.11:53: no such host" — including the
auth path, which is why API calls reported "user does not exist [uid: 0]"
rather than a database error.

on-failure cannot distinguish "finished successfully" from "shut itself down
and should be restarted", and Postgres exits 0 on several such paths, so it is
the wrong policy for an always-on stateful service.

This is the durable fix; it does not restart the currently stopped task.
2026-07-29 21:42:01 -07:00
..
ci-runner web/worker: add a process-level liveness heartbeat (#80) 2026-07-25 04:13:47 +00:00
caddy-git.conf infra: split the estate into vps1/vps2 — beta joins prod, dev gets a home (#103) 2026-07-26 06:56:38 +00:00
docker-stack.yml forgejo: restart the db service on a clean exit, not just on failure 2026-07-29 21:42:01 -07:00
README.md infra: split the estate into vps1/vps2 — beta joins prod, dev gets a home (#103) 2026-07-26 06:56:38 +00:00
register-lan-runner.sh infra: split the estate into vps1/vps2 — beta joins prod, dev gets a home (#103) 2026-07-26 06:56:38 +00:00

Forgejo on the Swarm cluster

Runs as deploy/forgejo/docker-stack.yml — the only Swarm-scheduled workload this cluster carries (prod and beta's app stacks are separate docker stack deploys that happen to run on the manager node, vps2 — see deploy/stack/README context in DEPLOY.md). Pinned to the vps1 node (75.119.132.91) via the role=forge label from deploy/swarm/label-forge-node.sh.

The Actions runner is deliberately not part of this stack — see DEPLOY-DEV.md and the note in register-lan-runner.sh's own header for where it runs today. That's the canonical placement per thermograph-docs/runbooks/implementation-handoff.md Track B step 5; an earlier revision of this stack ran the runner as a Swarm-scheduled Docker-in-Docker sidecar pinned to the Forgejo node, which is gone now.

Prerequisites

  1. All three nodes have joined the swarm (deploy/swarm/) and vps1 is labeled role=forge.
  2. docker node ls (from the manager, vps2) shows all three Ready.

One-time setup: Swarm secret

One secret the stack expects to already exist (a Swarm secret, not a file — external: true in the stack file, so docker stack deploy never creates or sees the value, only references it):

# A strong random password for Forgejo's own Postgres (NOT related to
# Thermograph's app database — entirely separate instance/network).
openssl rand -base64 32 | docker secret create forgejo_db_password -

Deploy / update

docker stack deploy -c deploy/forgejo/docker-stack.yml forgejo

Re-running is safe — Swarm only touches services whose spec actually changed. Do this before the DNS + Caddy step below — Caddy's reverse_proxy target (127.0.0.1:3080) needs the forgejo service actually listening first, or its first health check just fails harmlessly until it is.

This stack has no auto-deploy trigger — nothing in .forgejo/workflows/ redeploys it on push. A change to docker-stack.yml only takes effect once someone re-runs docker stack deploy by hand on the manager (vps2).

db/forgejo both carry resources.limits (defaults: db 1 CPU/1g, forgejo 2 CPU/2g — several times observed steady-state usage), overridable with FORGEJO_DB_CPUS/FORGEJO_DB_MEMORY/FORGEJO_CPUS/FORGEJO_MEMORY env vars before docker stack deploy, same convention as the app stack.

DNS + TLS: reusing vps1's existing Caddy, not a second reverse proxy

Forgejo is pinned to vps1 (role=forge) — the same box that also runs Grafana/Loki/Alloy and the emigriffith.dev portfolio site, each fronted by that host's own Caddy. A second ingress (Traefik) trying to bind the same ports would collide with it. So there's no Traefik in this stack: forgejo's web port publishes to 127.0.0.1:3080 only (host-local), and vps1's existing Caddy gets one more site block reverse-proxying to it — same pattern as its other site blocks, same automatic-HTTPS.

  1. Point the Forgejo domain (default git.thermograph.org; override with FORGEJO_DOMAIN=... before docker stack deploy) at vps1's public IP — that's where the task actually runs, not vps2's or the desktop's.
  2. Append deploy/forgejo/caddy-git.conf to vps1's /etc/caddy/Caddyfile, adjusting the domain if you didn't use the default, then systemctl reload caddy.
  3. That file also resolves the registry-exposure hazard (#15 in thermograph-docs/runbooks/hop1-forgejo-registry-cutover.md): /v2/* (the registry API) is blocked to everything except the WireGuard mesh CIDR (10.10.0.0/24); the git/web UI stays public. CI runners and Swarm nodes reach the registry over the mesh, not the public internet — see "Registry access from mesh clients" below.

Registry access from mesh clients

Any node that needs docker login/push/pull against the registry (the CI runner building/pushing images, any Swarm node pulling them, prod or beta on vps2 pulling app images) must reach git.thermograph.org over the WireGuard tunnel, not vps1's public IP — otherwise Caddy's /v2/* block above refuses the connection. Public DNS resolves the domain to vps1's public IP, so add a /etc/hosts override on each such node pinning it to vps1's WireGuard address instead:

echo "10.10.0.2 git.thermograph.org" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

(10.10.0.2 is vps1's WG address per deploy/swarm/README.md's peer numbering — adjust if you assigned it differently.) The git/web UI keeps working normally for everyone else since only /v2/* is restricted.

Register the Actions runner

Once Forgejo answers at its domain:

# On the runner host (see DEPLOY-DEV.md for where that is today):
#   Forgejo web UI -> Site Administration -> Actions -> Runners -> Create new Runner
#   (or, for a repo-scoped runner: <repo> -> Settings -> Actions -> Runners)
#   copy the registration token, then:
bash deploy/forgejo/register-lan-runner.sh https://<forgejo-domain> <token>

See that script's header for exactly what it replaces (the pre-Forgejo GitHub self-hosted runner) and why it registers with two labels where there used to be two separate runners.

config.yaml's runner.capacity is raised from the tool's default of 1 to 8 (override with CAPACITY=) — a single PR push fires pr-build, secrets-guard, and shell-lint simultaneously (3 independent workflows, no needs: between them), so capacity 1 serializes work that could run in parallel, and even capacity 3 (an earlier, undocumented hand-tune) leaves build-backend/build-frontend/validate-observability queued behind those three before they get a slot.

Adding more runner capacity should mean raising this number, or adding a second runner alongside it — not putting a runner on prod or beta (vps2). container.docker_host: automount gives job containers the host's Docker socket; on vps2 that would mean any CI job has root-equivalent access to both the prod and beta stacks running there. An earlier revision of this stack actually ran the runner as a Swarm-hosted container on the box Forgejo was pinned to and was deliberately reverted for this same class of reason — see the note at the top of docker-stack.yml.

Custom CI job image (ci-runner/)

ci-runner/Dockerfile still bases on node:20-bookworm — Node is a hard requirement, not leftover: Forgejo's runner executes actions/checkout@v4 (used by every workflow) as node dist/index.js inside the job container, regardless of whether the workflow itself uses npm/node. (v1 of this image tried a Node-free Debian-slim base and broke every job's checkout step — node: executable file not found — within a minute of going live; reverted immediately.) What it actually fixes: every docker-labeled build-push job currently re-installs the Docker CLI on each run (apt-get install docker.io), which pulls in the classic builder rather than BuildKit (the classic builder mishandles COPY --chown=<name> group resolution — a real bug hit during the frontend Go rewrite). ci-runner adds docker-ce-cli + docker-buildx-plugin (BuildKit) on top of the same Node base, plus git/python3/python3-yaml for the other jobs that need them (shell-lint, observability-validate).

Current tag: git.thermograph.org/emi/thermograph/ci-runner:v2 (v1 is broken — do not register any runner against it). Rebuild/push (requires a PAT with write:package scope — the embedded git-remote token lacks it, same requirement documented in build-push.yml):

docker build -t git.thermograph.org/emi/thermograph/ci-runner:vN deploy/forgejo/ci-runner
docker push git.thermograph.org/emi/thermograph/ci-runner:vN

register-lan-runner.sh's LABELS default points at the current tag, so fresh registrations pick it up automatically. The live runner is cut over by editing the labels array in ~/forgejo-runner/.runner on the runner host (same runner id/token, no re-registration needed) and restarting the service — verify a real job runs green under the new image before relying on it, same way v1's break was caught. Only after that verification should the now-redundant apt-get install docker.io / python3-yaml steps be removed from the workflows that had them — removing them first would break every job still running on the stock node:20-bookworm image.

Why Postgres here and not the Thermograph app's TimescaleDB

Separate instance, separate network (forgejo_net, not the app's overlay network), separate volume. Forgejo is a distinct product with its own schema and its own backup/restore lifecycle — sharing a database with the app would couple two things that should be able to fail, migrate, and restore independently.

Verifying

docker service ls                       # forgejo_db, forgejo_forgejo both Running, 1/1
curl -I https://git.thermograph.org/    # 200, valid cert (Caddy's, not a new one)
curl -I https://git.thermograph.org/v2/ # 403 from anywhere off the WireGuard mesh
# On the runner host, after registering the runner:
systemctl --user status forgejo-runner   # active, both labels registered

Rollback / removal

docker stack rm forgejo
# volumes (forgejo_data, forgejo_db, ...) survive a stack rm — remove them
# explicitly only if you actually want to destroy the Forgejo instance's data.