Not finished. Committed because the diagnosis is worth more than the code.
WHY ROOTLESS AND NOT THE DOCKER GROUP. `usermod -aG docker <user>` is the one-line version
and it is root: `docker run -v /:/host -it alpine chroot /host` is a root shell, which reads
.env, every other member's home and the wallet seed. Every boundary from today, bypassed by
one documented command. Rootless gives what was actually asked for — a daemon per account,
containers in that account's user namespace, images in their own home.
VERIFIED on this host: provisioning succeeds, the server reports 29.5.0, the daemon runs as
the member, `docker pull` puts 403 MB under their own home, and `docker ps -a` shows nothing
while the owner has four containers. That last line is the isolation, measured.
NOT VERIFIED: actually running a container. It failed, and the cause is an interaction
between two things built today:
failed to copy xattrs: failed to set xattr "system.posix_acl_default" on …/volumes/…/_data
Creating a volume copies xattrs, and the DEFAULT ACLs on a member's home — added so the file
browser could read their files — are inherited by Docker's storage, where a mapped id inside
a user namespace is not a valid id to set. Both features correct alone. The fix here strips
default ACLs from ~/.local/share/docker only, leaving the access ACLs the file browser needs.
That fix is UNPROVEN. The re-test failed for a different, environmental reason: probe users
recycle uid 1001, and a stale lingering systemd user manager from a previous probe answered
`systemctl --user`, so the unit appeared not to exist. Cleaned with `loginctl terminate-user`.
Retest on a machine that has not had a uid-1001 user, or on a fresh uid.
Also worth knowing before this ships: uid reuse after deleting a member is a real hazard, not
just a test artefact — the next member gets the previous member's uid, and anything left
lingering belongs to them.
setup.sh gains uidmap and dbus-user-session as core packages; the shell template exports
DOCKER_HOST from $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR when the socket exists.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A new Linux account opens a shell with nothing: useradd copies /etc/skel, which on Ubuntu
is a bash rc, and the account's shell is zsh — so it got no prompt, no history, no
completion, no colour. "Their own account" should not mean a worse terminal than the
owner's.
src/servers/shell-skel/zshrc is the template, and scripts/starship.toml is reused rather
than copied: setup.sh already deploys it for the owner, so one file serves both audiences
and they cannot drift. Seeded by provisionOsAccount, which means the retry button applies
it to accounts that already exist — no delete-and-recreate.
The template depends on nothing but zsh. Starship, eza, nvim, bun, deno and cargo are each
used only if present, and every path is $HOME-relative — the owner's own .zshrc has three
absolute /home/pastilhas paths in it, which is exactly what a template must not inherit.
Without starship it falls back to a zsh prompt showing the same information, because a
shell that opens with a broken prompt reads as a broken machine.
Never overwrites: written only when the file is ABSENT. ~/.zshrc.local is sourced last and
never written, so there is somewhere to put your own config that no future template can
reach.
Three fixes found by running it:
- install -D creates missing parents but applies -o/-g only to the FILE, so ~/.config came
out root:root — readable but not writable by its owner, which would have surfaced weeks
later as one tool mysteriously failing. The parent is now created explicitly.
- useradd took its shell from process.env.SHELL, which under PM2 is whatever PM2 was
launched from. A member's shell depended on how the server happened to be started. Now
chosen from what is installed: zsh, else bash.
- the pty sidecar spawned ITS $SHELL for a member, not theirs. It now execs their passwd
shell via sh -c, so the login shell in /etc/passwd is the one they get.
starship moves out of the light-profile skip. The light profile exists to serve a file
browser, a terminal and chat — the terminal is one of its three reasons to be, and it is
what every member gets. Leaving starship out meant the fallback prompt on exactly the
installs most likely to have members. oh-my-zsh, eza and lazygit stay full-only.
Verified in a real member shell: zsh from passwd, HISTFILE in their own home, eza-backed
ll, starship active, EDITOR=nvim, and an edit to .zshrc surviving a reprovision.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5