Two real, verified findings from actually testing the "let Caddy issue a
self-signed cert automatically" approach against a literal IP:
1. TLS SNI is not sent for literal IP connections (out of spec — SNI's
HostName type explicitly excludes IPs). Confirmed via openssl s_client:
the handshake fails with a TLS-layer internal_error, even though Caddy
logs "certificate obtained successfully" — Caddy has no way to select a
cert without SNI. No Caddyfile config fixes this; the address has to be
a hostname.
2. Caddy's automatic-HTTPS heuristic only treats bare IPs and "localhost"
as obviously-private. Any other name — including a made-up LAN hostname
like "bookstore-staging.test" — it assumes might be real and tries
Let's Encrypt, which fails the same way staging.example.com did.
Fixed by forcing `tls internal` explicitly in Caddyfile.staging,
removing the guesswork entirely.
Verified end-to-end with curl --resolve (proper SNI, no real DNS/hosts
change needed to test): direct HTTPS 200, HTTP->HTTPS redirect chain 200.
README now documents the /etc/hosts requirement and how to trust Caddy's
root cert to skip the one-time browser warning.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The reported bug (a generated password containing "$BRjTx3tlmSpz" got
silently blanked, breaking the DB connection) is the same Compose
interpolation issue as the earlier bcrypt hash, but this time in fields
that are genuinely user-chosen and can't just be avoided by convention.
Switched DB_PASSWORD/DB_ROOT_PASSWORD to Docker's official `_FILE`
secrets convention (MARIADB_PASSWORD_FILE / WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD_FILE),
backed by Compose's native `secrets:` mechanism: deploy.sh writes the raw
value to secrets/<env>/db_password, and the container reads that file
directly — the value never passes through Compose's ${VAR} interpolation
at all. Verified end-to-end with an actual `$`-containing password,
including a full deploy → backup → restore → still-serving round trip.
Also fixed along the way (found while actually testing, not assumed):
- Makefile never exported ENVIRONMENT, so `make up` alone (bypassing
deploy.sh) would have left the new secrets path unresolved.
- deploy.sh chmod'd the secret files 600, unreadable by the container's
own UID (www-data) — fixed to 644, relying on the containing directory
(700) to keep other host users out instead.
- backup.sh/restore.sh still called `mysqldump`/`mysql`, which don't
exist in the mariadb:11 image under those names — renamed to
mariadb-dump/mariadb. (This means neither script had actually
succeeded before now; both are verified working end-to-end here.)
The supplier/payment API keys remain passed the old way — nothing reads
them yet (bookstore-core is still a stub), so there's no live bug to fix
there; noted in .env.example that the same _FILE pattern should be used
once that code exists.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Staging runs on a private-network VM, not reachable from outside, so the
HTTP basic-auth layer was unnecessary defense-in-depth. Removing it also
lets the Caddyfile drop the render-around-Compose workaround entirely
(that workaround existed specifically because Compose's interpolation
mangles a bcrypt hash) — the noindex header and blog_public=0 stay, since
those guard against search-engine indexing, a separate concern from
network-level access.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Replace the bare-repo post-receive hook with deploy/poll-deploy.sh: Gitea
and the Docker hosts are separate machines, so each box polls its branch
via host crontab instead of needing an exposed webhook receiver.
- Add Blocksy theme + Blocksy Companion auto-install to deploy.sh (free
tier; the paid Book Store starter site still needs a manual license step).
- Fix deploy.sh/backup.sh/restore.sh sourcing .env files as bash: a bcrypt
hash's `$2a$14$...` shape breaks under `set -u`. Replaced with
deploy/lib/env.sh, a literal (non-executing) KEY=VALUE reader.
- Fix docker compose itself mangling the same kind of value: both
`environment: ${VAR}` and `env_file:` run values through Compose's
interpolation, which silently blanks `$identifier`-shaped substrings.
The staging basic-auth hash is now rendered directly into the Caddyfile
by deploy.sh, bypassing Compose's variable system entirely.
- Fix dev/staging/production silently sharing one Compose project (and
therefore one db_data volume) by pinning an explicit -p per environment.
- cron and wordpress now share one environment anchor so they can't drift
apart again (cron was silently missing WORDPRESS_CONFIG_EXTRA before).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
twooeyandClaude Sonnet 5