---
id: infra/opm-officer-s-own-process-manager
title: "OPM — Officer's own process manager, or at least its own PM2"
theme: infra
status: open
created: 2026-08-21
date_source: stated
order: 0
---

**OPM — Officer's own process manager, or at least its own PM2.** Raised 2026-08-21. Taken as: give
Officer's processes a manager of their own, **named OPM**, rather than sharing one daemon with whatever
else lives on the host — worth doing for separation of concerns alone, even without any new capability.

The argument is that Officer is now a fleet of processes, not a process. `pm2 jlist` counts **13 officer
entries on `officer-dev` and 19 on `alpha`** (verified 2026-08-21), and every one of them is a peer of
the server rather than a child of it. They are managed today by a generated `ecosystem.config.cjs`
(`bun run gen:ecosystem`) on a PM2 daemon that belongs to the login user, not to Officer.

What sharing costs, all of it already written down in `CLAUDE.md`: `pm2 restart ecosystem.config.cjs`
bounces **every** sidecar including the vault, so the safe habit is `--only <name>` and the unsafe one
looks identical; a `pm2 list` mixes Officer's processes with other projects' and the rule "nothing here
should touch them" is a convention rather than a boundary; and the documented list of entries goes stale
every time a sidecar lands, because nothing owns it. **Note the foreign-process case is host-dependent** —
`mybiblepal-api` and `mybiblepal-audio` are named in `CLAUDE.md` as sharing this daemon, and neither is
running on `officer-dev` or `alpha` today.

Open, and the owner's call: whether OPM is a genuinely new supervisor or PM2 kept underneath with its own
daemon, namespace and CLI wrapper — which would buy the separation at a fraction of the cost, since the
`ecosystem.config.cjs` generation, the naming convention and the restart discipline all already exist.

---

**Decided 2026-08-25: it is happening, and it answers the open question above.** OPM is a genuinely new
supervisor, not PM2-with-a-wrapper — because the next requirement needs something PM2 was never built
for: **OPM should sit ON the Docker network, so a container-backed dependency never needs a published
host port at all.**

Verified on this host what that would remove. `docker network ls` shows dedicated bridge networks
already in place (`officerdev`, `services`, `nginx`) — the grouping this asks for exists, containers are
just not reached through it. What IS published today, purely so a host process can reach a container,
is the thing this closes: `officer-postgres` is `127.0.0.1:5432->5432`, `gitea` is
`127.0.0.1:9004->3000` and `127.0.0.1:10023->22`. Every one of those bindings exists for exactly one
reason — a process on the host, not in Docker, needs to reach the container — and every one is a port
that answers on localhost to anything else running as the same user, not only to Officer.

If OPM itself runs attached to the Docker network (or as a container on it), it reaches
`officer-postgres:5432` and `gitea:3000` by container name, over the network Docker already isolates,
and the host-published bindings above stop being necessary for Officer's own processes to work. Whether
they can be removed entirely depends on who ELSE reaches them this way — `POSTGRES_URL` and any
migration/backup tooling run from a plain shell would need to move onto the network too, or keep a
narrower published port for that one purpose. That accounting is the first real task once this starts,
not an assumption to build on.