Four production defects, all found by auditing the running host rather than
the code. Each one had a signature that looked like a network or permissions
problem and was actually a configuration or ordering bug.
jobs-worker never ran
`import "./load-env"` sat on line 3 of scripts/jobs-worker.ts, but ESM
evaluates a module's imports in source order and the first import reaches
`@/env`, which validates process.env at import time. The ZodError on
DATABASE_URL therefore fired before load-env ever executed, so the worker
could only start from a shell that had already exported the configuration.
Nothing supervised it either, so scheduled articles, catalog export, JAR and
database backups, disk alerts and the ops health probe have all been dead;
`cms:jobs-worker:heartbeat` did not exist. Moved the import to the top and
added deployment/systemd/cms-jobs-worker.service with Restart=always.
The JAR backup additionally pointed at './emulator/Arcturus.jar', which does
not exist and would go stale on the next emulator upgrade. resolveEmulatorJar
now accepts a file, a directory or a wildcard and picks the newest JAR, the
same way emulator.service picks its build, and reports an unresolvable path
once instead of logging an opaque copyFile ENOENT every night.
/api/health answered 200 with the database down
The route documented this as intentional, and ci-deploy.sh worked around it
by grepping the body for '"database":true'. The container healthcheck did not,
so Docker reported containers healthy while every page 500'd. The status is
now load-bearing: 503 when the database is unreachable, 200 otherwise. Redis
and the emulator deliberately do not fail the container — both have in-process
fallbacks, so failing them would trade a slow site for an outage.
The runtime had no V8 heap cap
NODE_OPTIONS existed only in the builder stage. With no cap, V8 sized its
heap from host memory (23.5 GB) while the container was limited to 4 GB, so
the kernel OOM-killed the process mid-request — the same failure mode as the
14 host-wide `next-build` kills. docker-start.mjs now reads the cgroup limit
(v2 with a v1 fallback) and sets 70% of it, respecting an explicit override.
Storage ownership was only repaired for one path
ci-deploy.sh chowned storage/imaging and nothing else, so
storage/catalog-git/hotel-status.json kept coming back root:root and
/api/admin/catalog/status kept throwing EACCES. All eight writable storage
paths are repaired now. The silent-failure mode is the reason this mattered:
these writes sit inside try/catch, so a wrong owner looks like a slow page
rather than an error.
nginx: robots.txt was a guaranteed 404, and TLS never resumed
`index index.html` without a `root` left every try_files resolving against
/etc/nginx/html, which sits behind a 0750 directory — the worker got EACCES
on each stat and nginx logs a failed stat at crit, which is where 149 crit
lines per scan came from. robots.txt answered from that same broken location,
so crawlers were pointed at a file they could never read while sitemap.xml
kept advertising it. Added `root`, proxied robots.txt to the CMS, added
ssl_session_cache (there was no session resumption at all), and set
Restart=on-failure in a systemd override, since the packaged unit ships
Restart=no and nginx is the only thing serving the site.
Verified against the running host: 3379 tests, typecheck and biome clean,
nginx -t passes, health returns 200 with every check green, and the worker has
run for hours at NRestarts=0 with a heartbeat refreshing each minute.
- Remove random TTL jitter to prevent unpredictable cache drops
- Add deterministic LRU eviction with proper entry cleanup
- Improve cache deduplication to prevent duplicate computations
- Skip Redis I/O during tests for faster, more stable execution
- Optimize depth calculation in catalog tree nodes
- Maintain backward compatibility and full test coverage (3331 passed)
openhands
Simo