trails/docs/deployment.md
Ullrich Schäfer f4d2cf027c docs(journal): federation privacy manifest + runbook + honest home blurb (§10)
10.1 Privacy manifest (legal/privacy):
- German legal half: Föderation entry under Empfänger/Drittanbieter —
  what a public profile exposes, what accepted followers' servers
  receive, the loss-of-control over delivered copies, Art. 6(1)(a)
  basis, private profiles don't federate.
- English manifest half: dedicated Federation (ActivityPub) section —
  actor object contents, push delivery + retraction semantics (incl.
  the tombstone caveat), encrypted-at-rest signing keys, remote actor
  cache, ingested remote content with the followers-only viewer gate,
  inbox logging/rate limits. PRIVACY_LAST_UPDATED bumped.

10.2 docs/deployment.md federation runbook: enabling per environment,
key rotation posture, abuse monitoring, and the troubleshooting
checklist distilled from the 2026-06-06/07 soak (IP families first,
no outbox backfill, tombstones, the 10s delivery timeout, actor
re-fetch).

10.3 Home marketing blurb (en+de) aligned to what actually ships:
Mastodon can follow you + trails-to-trails outbound — no more 'follow
friends anywhere' overstatement.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-06-07 12:21:51 +02:00

8.8 KiB
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Deployment runbook

trails.cool runs on two Hetzner hosts. This document covers what an operator needs to know beyond the CLAUDE.md summary.

Hosts

Role Host IPs SSH
Flagship (Cloud) trails.cool public + 10.0.0.2 (vSwitch) ssh -i ~/.ssh/trails-cool-deploy root@trails.cool
BRouter (Dedicated) ullrich.is public 176.9.150.227 + 10.0.1.10 (vSwitch) ssh -i ~/.ssh/trails-brouter-deploy -p 2232 trails@ullrich.is

Both hosts are in fsn1 (Falkenstein) and joined on Hetzner vSwitch #80672 (VLAN 4000). The flagship's Terraform (infrastructure/terraform/) owns the Cloud Network + subnets + server attachment. The dedicated host's VLAN sub-interface is configured out-of-band via netplan (/etc/netplan/60-trails-vswitch.yaml), because the Robot side isn't in the Hetzner Cloud API.

BRouter host — first-time provisioning

See infrastructure/brouter-host/README.md. The short version:

# As root (one-time firewall allowances):
ufw allow in on enp4s0.4000 from 10.0.0.2 to any port 17777 proto tcp \
  comment 'trails brouter via flagship vSwitch'
ufw allow in on enp4s0.4000 from 10.0.0.2 to any port 8080 proto tcp \
  comment 'trails brouter cadvisor via flagship vSwitch'

# As the trails user:
cd ~/brouter  # created by the first cd-brouter deploy
./download-segments.sh   # ~10 GB, a few minutes on a good connection
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

Secrets rotation

Tokens (including BROUTER_AUTH_TOKEN):

  1. Generate: openssl rand -base64 32
  2. Edit: SOPS_AGE_KEY_FILE=~/.config/sops/age/keys.txt sops infrastructure/secrets.app.env
  3. Commit + push + merge → cd-apps redeploys the Planner with the new token.
  4. Touch anything under infrastructure/brouter-host/ (or run gh workflow run cd-brouter.yml) → cd-brouter redeploys the Caddy sidecar with the new token.
  5. Brief overlap window where Planner sends new token while Caddy still checks the old value. Both redeploys should complete within a minute of each other; in the worst case a few Planner requests get 403 and retry.

SOPS on macOS looks for the age key at ~/Library/Application Support/sops/age/keys.txt by default. If yours lives under XDG-standard ~/.config/sops/age/keys.txt, set SOPS_AGE_KEY_FILE as above or export it in your shell rc.

Cutover procedure (flagship BRouter → dedicated host)

This is how BROUTER_URL gets flipped. Do it once the dedicated host is provisioned, segments are seeded, and the compose project is up.

  1. Pre-flight: curl -sfH "X-BRouter-Auth: $(sops -d infrastructure/secrets.app.env | grep ^BROUTER_AUTH_TOKEN= | cut -d= -f2-)" http://10.0.1.10:17777/brouter?lonlats=11.58,48.13\|11.59,48.14\&profile=trekking\&alternativeidx=0\&format=gpx from the flagship. Expect 200 with GPX. Then curl without the header — expect 403.
  2. Wire the token without flipping the URL. Edit SOPS: sops infrastructure/secrets.app.env — the BROUTER_AUTH_TOKEN is already in there. If BROUTER_URL isn't in SOPS, skip; the compose has a default. Merge. Planner redeploys; it now sends the header to the flagship BRouter (which ignores it).
  3. Flip the URL. In SOPS, add BROUTER_URL=http://10.0.1.10:17777. Merge. cd-apps redeploys the Planner.
  4. Monitor. Grafana "BRouter (dedicated host)" dashboard + brouter_request_duration_seconds on the Overview board. Watch for 30 minutes.
  5. Rollback (if needed): remove the BROUTER_URL line from SOPS (falls back to the flagship default). Merge; redeploy. The flagship container is still warm during the soak window.
  6. Decommission flagship BRouter (after 48 h of clean metrics): remove the brouter: service + ./segments volume from infrastructure/docker-compose.yml. Merge. cd-infra restarts without BRouter. Reclaim ~2 GB of segment volume on the flagship.

Full restart (flagship)

gh workflow run cd-infra.yml -f restart_all=true

Restarts every flagship service. Does NOT touch the BRouter host.

Network-changing deploys (flagship)

Changing options on an existing Docker network (enable_ipv6, subnets, drivers) requires Docker to recreate the network — and a network can only be recreated when no container from any compose project is attached. The flagship has three+ projects sharing trails-shared (production, persistent staging, every PR preview), and the CD workflows only manage their own project, so a network-option change shipped through cd-infra alone WILL deadlock mid-deploy and can leave production down (this is exactly the 2026-06-06/07 outage: postgres stopped for the recreation, the deploy failed on the held network, nothing restarted it for ~9 hours).

The manual procedure, in order, on the flagship:

cd /opt/trails-cool
# 1. Free trails-shared: down every preview + persistent staging
docker compose ls --filter name=trails-pr- --format json   # enumerate previews
docker compose -f docker-compose.staging.yml -p trails-pr-<N> --env-file staging-pr-<N>.env down
docker compose -f docker-compose.staging.yml -p trails-staging --env-file staging.env --profile persistent down
# 2. Recreate networks via the production project
docker compose --env-file app.env down
docker compose --env-file app.env up -d
# 3. Bring staging + previews back
docker compose -f docker-compose.staging.yml -p trails-staging --env-file staging.env --profile persistent up -d
docker compose -f docker-compose.staging.yml -p trails-pr-<N> --env-file staging-pr-<N>.env up -d
# 4. Verify
docker network inspect trails-cool_default trails-shared --format '{{.Name}} ipv6={{.EnableIPv6}}'
curl -sf https://trails.cool/api/health && curl -sf https://staging.trails.cool/api/health

Plan it as a short maintenance window (~23 min downtime); don't ship network-option changes expecting the workflows to apply them.

Federation runbook

Federation (ActivityPub via Fedify) is gated by FEDERATION_ENABLED=true per environment. Currently: staging on, production off. The full change history and design live in openspec/changes/social-federation/.

Enabling on an environment

  1. Ensure FEDERATION_KEY_ENCRYPTION_KEY is in secrets.app.env (SOPS) — keypair generation fails closed in production without it.
  2. Set FEDERATION_ENABLED=true in the environment's compose env (see cd-staging.yml for the staging pattern).
  3. First boot with the flag on enqueues backfill-user-keypairs (generates RSA keys for existing users — idempotent) and registers the federation jobs (deliver-activity, poll-remote-actor, poll-remote-outboxes, federation-kv-sweep).
  4. Smoke: curl -s "https://<domain>/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:<user>@<domain>" (200 for a public user, 404 otherwise) and /nodeinfo/2.1.

FEDERATION_LOG_LEVEL=debug turns on Fedify's per-request signature diagnostics (staging runs debug during soaks; dial back to info).

Key rotation

Rotating FEDERATION_KEY_ENCRYPTION_KEY requires re-encrypting every users.private_key_encrypted (decrypt with old, encrypt with new) — there is no script yet; write one against apps/journal/app/lib/federation-keys.server.ts primitives when first needed. Rotating a single user's keypair: NULL their key columns and let the backfill regenerate (remotes pick the new key up from the actor document; deliveries signed with the old key fail until then).

Abuse monitoring

  • Inbox is rate-limited 60 req/5 min per source instance (federationSourceHost); 429s show in journal logs.
  • Outbound is paced (1 req/s delivery, 1 req/5 s polling per host).
  • Watch docker logs <journal> for fedify·federation lines; Loki picks them up. No per-instance blocklist yet — see docs/ideas/instance-administration.md (manual emergency lever: block the source IP/host in Caddy).

Troubleshooting deliveries

Hard-won checklist from the 2026-06-06/07 soak (details in openspec/changes/social-federation/design.md):

  1. Test both IP families from inside the journal container before suspecting signatures (family: 6 vs 4 — dangling A records and v6-only instances are common; our containers have IPv6 since #466/#468).
  2. Remote shows the post count but no posts → remotes never backfill outbox history; only pushed or individually-fetched objects appear.
  3. Delivered but invisible, no errors anywhere → check the remote's tombstones table; a previously-retracted URI is refused forever.
  4. Mastodon gives deliveries a 10s read timeout — anything synchronous and slow in the inbox path breaks federation silently.
  5. Actor changes (profile fields, keys) need the remote to re-fetch: tootctl accounts refresh user@domain on a Mastodon you control.

cd-brouter manual trigger

gh workflow run cd-brouter.yml

Useful to redeploy the BRouter host after token rotation or a config change, without needing a real source change under infrastructure/brouter-host/.