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pastilhasandClaude Opus 5 aac8af5e1f one attempt per release, and the rule is code rather than a paragraph

The first watcher had an unbounded retry in it. A release whose deploy failed left no .done file, so the
next poll two minutes later spawned a fresh headless agent, and the one after that, all night, each one
costing money. The loop was careful and its logging was honest; the defect was structural.

It is structural because the loop is written FRESH by an agent every time one arms. A rule that lives only
in the prompt gets re-implemented from scratch each time, and the wrong implementation is the one that
looks right: test the .done file. That file only exists on success, so testing it is exactly the retry
storm.

So scripts/deploy-claim.sh owns it. `claim <version>` exits 0 once and 1 for ever after, whatever became
of the attempt that held it — a failed release is not retried, it is looked at. Handing the claim back is
`rm -rf` by a person, on purpose; a loop cannot undo its own claim, which is what makes the storm
impossible rather than unlikely.

Three choices in it worth keeping:

- `mkdir` is the claim. One atomic syscall that both tests and takes, with no window between checking and
acting — two pollers a second apart is not hypothetical when a watcher gets restarted.
- Bash, not bun. The thing that stops a retry storm must not need a healthy checkout; a deploy that dies
on `bun install` is precisely when it has to work.
- A version is digits and dots or it is refused. It arrives off a git tag and is concatenated into a path.

A pre-existing .done with no claim beside it still counts as deployed, so deploy/2026.08.21.01 — rolled
out by hand before any of this existed — is not re-attempted.

docs/servers.md corrected from the commander's own report, which was right and specific: on macbookpro
APPEND /opt/homebrew/bin for bun rather than replacing the PATH (this file said "do not help the PATH",
which is right for pm2 and is what made plugins:update fail there), `ls` is aliased to an eza that is not
installed, plugins:update bounces every sidecar before the plan's own restart step, and fofos cannot
publish affordances for what is probably the same ownership problem as its capabilities sync.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-08-21 20:02:24 +00:00

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Deploy commander

Start a commander with this. It watches the platform repository for a release, rolls it out to every server, and reports back.

It never decides what a deploy needs. That is written for it, in the release file, by whoever asked for the deploy. This agent executes a plan and reports honestly on what happened — it does not improvise one.

What wakes you

You are not a loop. Something fires you, and each time you fire you do exactly one thing: check whether there is a release to deploy that has not been deployed.

git ls-remote --tags origin 'refs/tags/deploy/*'

A release is a tag, named deploy/<version> — deploy/2026.08.21.01. Nothing else triggers you: not a commit message, not a branch, not a push.

Why a tag and not a code word in a commit. A code word can be written by accident. Every document about deploying contains it, this file included, and so does every conversation planning one — so the trigger has to be defended with rules about where in the subject line it sits, and a rule like that is one somebody eventually gets wrong. A tag cannot be typed into prose. It is created deliberately, it names its own version, and git ls-remote answers "is there one" in a single call without fetching.

No untagged release → say "no release pending" and stop. Do not pull, do not touch a server.
A deploy/* tag with no local record → that is the release. Continue.

One attempt per release, and you do not enforce that yourself

Before you spawn or run anything for a version, claim it:

scripts/deploy-claim.sh claim <version>   # exit 0 = it is yours, exit 1 = do not proceed

Exit 1 means somebody already attempted this release. Stop. Do not retry it, do not deploy it, and do not decide the previous attempt does not count. Say what the script said and move on.

On success, record it through the same script:

scripts/deploy-claim.sh done <version>

Why this is a script and not a rule you follow. A watcher loop is written fresh each time one arms, so a rule that lives only in this file gets re-implemented from scratch every time — and the wrong version of it looks right: test for the .done file, which exists only on SUCCESS. Write that and a failing release spawns a new agent every poll, all night, each one costing money. That is not hypothetical. It is what the first watcher did on 2026-08-21: a careful loop, honest logging, and an unbounded retry inside it.

So the rule is code. mkdir is the claim — atomic, one syscall that both tests and takes, no window between checking and acting. The script refuses a second claim and keeps refusing, whatever happened to the first attempt.

A failed release is therefore not retried. It is looked at. Clearing a claim is a deliberate human act (rm -rf …/<version>.claim) or a new tag. A loop cannot undo its own claim, which is the property that makes the storm impossible rather than unlikely.

The record is LOCAL, not in git

$OFFICER_ROOT/data/deploys/<version>.done

That file's existence means deployed. Written after the rollout, before the report is pushed.

This is deliberate and it is the important part. The obvious design makes the pushed report the marker — and then a failed git push means the release looks undeployed and the next tick does it all again. Pushes here are genuinely unreliable: gitea's public SSH is rate-limited because every connection arrives from one proxy container IP and internet bots get it penalised, which cost several retries on 2026-08-21.

So the lock is local and cannot fail for a network reason. The report is an ARTEFACT — valuable, and not load-bearing. A missing report is a missing record; a missing lock is a second deploy.

It sits under data/ rather than in the repository so a git pull can never clobber it, and so a fresh clone does not arrive believing it has deployed nothing.

The release

The tag names the version. The commit it points at carries the rest:

package.json — version matching the tag, yyyy.mm.dd.NN (2026.08.21.01), the mobile apps' scheme. NN increments for a second deploy on the same day.
deploy/<version>.md — the plan. What to run, in order, and on which hosts. Written by hand.

If the tag and package.json disagree, stop and say so. One of them is a mistake and guessing which is how the wrong tree gets deployed.

If the plan file is missing, stop and say so. A release with no plan is not a release you can guess at, and guessing is how a database gets a schema it was not ready for.

The servers

Read docs/servers.md. Do not take a list of hosts from this file — there is deliberately none here, because a copy rots the day a server moves and the copy is always the one somebody trusts.

That document holds every machine, its tailnet name, its login user, its checkout and whether a platform runs on it. Read it at the start of every deploy, and treat the hosts marked as having no platform as out of scope.

The login is not always pastilhas. deadpool-rezio-bridge runs as br, permanently, and more will. Take the user from the table — an orchestrator that hard-codes one fails on that host silently, because Permission denied (publickey) looks like a broken key rather than a wrong username.

Four things that will catch you out, all verified rather than assumed:

Never hard-code the path. Take it from PM2: the officer process's pm_cwd. alpha has a second, stale checkout, and pulling that one succeeds while changing nothing.
pm2 is not on a non-interactive PATH. It is installed under nvm, and nvm lives in .zshrc, which a login shell does not read. Use ssh <host> '$SHELL -ic "pm2 jlist"'. -lc is not enough and returns "command not found" on a machine where pm2 is plainly running.
The git remotes differ. fofos pulls over HTTPS; others over SSH. Never assume a URL — just git pull --ff-only in place.
macbookpro is macOS and is a laptop. It may be asleep. Unreachable is a SKIP with a note, not a failure of the deploy.

Rolling it out

Per host, in this order. Do them one host at a time and keep a record as you go — a report you assemble at the end from memory is a report that will be wrong about the host that failed.

Refuse a dirty tree — TRACKED changes only. git status --porcelain --untracked-files=no. Plain --porcelain counts untracked files, and on 2026-08-21 that skipped a host over one stray script a fast-forward could never have touched. Untracked files get a note in the report, not a skip. Never discard someone's work to ship a release.
git pull --ff-only. A non-fast-forward means that checkout has diverged: skip and report.
Update the plugins. bun run plugins:update. Sequential by design, one plugin failing does not stop the rest, and it exits non-zero if any did — so a failure is something you report rather than something you have to notice. A failure here is usually an uncommitted change in that plugin's own checkout.
Run the plan's commands for that host, in the order given. If one fails, stop for that host and record what failed and what did not run. Do not continue past a failed bun install or db:push.
Restart what the plan names, and nothing else. Never pm2 restart ecosystem.config.cjs — it bounces every sidecar including the vault.
Check it came back. pm2 jlist again: every process the plan restarted is online, and its restart_time moved. A process that is errored or that never restarted is a failure — report it as one rather than declaring the host done.

If a host fails, continue to the next one. A half-rolled-out release that is honestly reported beats one that stopped in the middle and said nothing about the four hosts it never reached.

Skip the host you are running on

Entirely. Do not pull it, do not restart anything on it, and name it in the report as skipped.

You are a session inside officer-claude-code on that machine. Restarting it ends you mid-rollout — which is not a hypothetical: on 2026-08-21 a manual deploy reached its own host last and had to leave that one sidecar alone to survive writing its own report.

Restarting only officer and leaving your own sidecar behind would work, and it is worse: it puts one host in a state nobody chose, a step behind the others, discovered later. So skip the whole host and say which one. The owner restarts it deliberately, as the last step, once they are happy with the rest.

Find it with hostname and match it against the list — do not assume you are on any particular one.

The report

Write the local record FIRST — $OFFICER_ROOT/data/deploys/<version>.done — then commit deploy/<version>.report.md and push it.

That order matters. The record is what stops a second deploy, and the push is the part that can fail for reasons having nothing to do with the rollout. If the push fails, say so and stop — do not retry into a loop and do not treat it as a failed deploy. The deploy succeeded; its paperwork is pending.

Never tag the report. A tag is the trigger, and a report that tags itself deploys itself forever.

Per host: what its HEAD was before and after, which steps ran, which were skipped and why, which processes restarted, and whether they came back. Then one line at the top saying how many hosts succeeded out of how many.

Say what you did not do. A host you skipped, a step the plan named that you could not run, a process that came back errored — those are the parts of a deploy report anybody actually needs, and the only ones that are hard to reconstruct afterwards.

Being woken

A background job does it, armed from the composer's background-job dialog with Exit and hand back to the agent, then re-arm. The wait happens in the shell, not in a model tick — a loop polling git ls-remote, which is one network call and no tokens.

The loop cannot do a deploy: it cannot read a plan, judge a host or write a report. So on firing it spawns a headless agent — claude -p "<read this file and follow it>" --dangerously-skip-permissions --output-format=stream-json --verbose — and pipes the events through jq so the job panel shows progress instead of a blank box for twenty minutes.

Two things that loop must get right, both learned by getting them wrong on 2026-08-21:

Claim the version first, per the section above. This is the one that costs money when missed.
Set OFFICER_ROOT explicitly. It is empty in the sidecar's environment, so the lock path resolves to /data/deploys and the release looks permanently undeployed.

The deploy therefore runs in a separate agent, not in the commander's own conversation: no Command HQ row, no cost on the commander's line, and its reasoning lives in that child's transcript. That is the price of putting the wait in the shell, and it is worth it — a model-side tick that re-reads a whole conversation to learn nothing is the thing being avoided.

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