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>
Two separate leaks were causing the same cosmetic-but-annoying warning to
survive every previous fix attempt:
1. Compose's own `secrets:` block reads the referenced file's *content*
as part of its config model, and applies the same interpolation
warning to it — even with DB_PASSWORD fully removed from every ${VAR}
and --env-file path. Switched from Compose's native `secrets:` to plain
bind mounts at the same /run/secrets/* paths: a bind mount only ever
touches the file's path, never its content, so it's immune. (Verified
this precisely with an isolated repro before rolling it out — the two
mechanisms behave differently even though they look equivalent.)
2. caddy's `env_file: .env.staging` (a leftover from the since-removed
basic-auth setup) loaded the *raw*, unfiltered env file directly,
bypassing deploy.sh/backup.sh/restore.sh's filtered-copy mechanism
entirely. Caddy only ever needed SITE_DOMAIN; switched to passing that
one value directly instead of the whole file.
Also fixed Caddyfile.staging: the site address had no explicit scheme, so
Caddy's automatic-HTTPS logic still applied to a private IP (registering
its own internal CA and redirecting HTTP->HTTPS) — not the "plain HTTP
only" behavior I'd assumed and told the user earlier. Prefixed with
`http://` to genuinely disable automatic HTTPS for this LAN-only box.
Verified end-to-end: fresh deploy with dollar-sign DB passwords produces
zero warnings, serves HTTP 200 on plain http:// with no redirect, and the
DB connection genuinely authenticates.
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