jobtrackingapp/deploy/README.md

Production deployment notes

Gitea Actions

This repo includes .gitea/workflows/ci-deploy.yml for:

• backend build
• backend tests
• frontend tests
• frontend production build
• deployment to Ubuntu after successful tests on main

Required secrets in Gitea

• PROD_HOST
• PROD_USER
• PROD_SSH_KEY

Ubuntu server setup

Recommended app path:

• /opt/job-tracker/app

Persistent runtime secrets path:

• /opt/job-tracker/shared/.env

Requirements:

• Docker Engine
• Docker Compose plugin
• reverse proxy in front (Nginx, Caddy, or Traefik)
• shared env file present on server in /opt/job-tracker/shared/.env
• network connectivity from the backend container to your mariadb container/service

The deploy script will automatically create a symlink from:

• /opt/job-tracker/shared/.env

to:

• /opt/job-tracker/app/.env

This keeps secrets outside the uploaded repo checkout so they are not wiped by CI deploys.

Frontend API base URL

The production frontend already proxies /api to the backend container via Nginx.

Recommended default:

• leave REACT_APP_API_BASE_URL unset/empty in production

Only set REACT_APP_API_BASE_URL if the UI must call a different external API origin on purpose.

Example production .env

DATABASE_PROVIDER=mariadb
JOBTRACKER_CONNECTION_STRING=server=mariadb;port=3306;database=jobtracker;user=jobtracker;password=REPLACE_ME
AUTH_JWT_KEY=replace_with_long_random_secret
AUTH_ADMIN_EMAIL=you@example.com
AUTH_ADMIN_PASSWORD=replace_with_strong_password
APP_PUBLIC_BASE_URL=https://your-domain.example
AI_SERVICE_BASE_URL=http://ai-service:8001
OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://ollama:11434
OLLAMA_MODEL=qwen2.5:7b
EMAIL_FOLLOWUPREMINDERS_ENABLED=true
EMAIL_FOLLOWUPREMINDERS_UPCOMINGDAYS=2
# Optional backward-compatible alias if older config still references the previous name:
SUMMARIZER_BASE_URL=http://ai-service:8001

Database recommendation

For production, yes — use a real database.

Recommended direction

Short term:

• SQLite is acceptable for a single-user or very small deployment
• keep backups and volume persistence

Better production choice:

• MariaDB or PostgreSQL

My recommendation

• PostgreSQL if you want the best long-term maintainability and fewer edge cases
• MariaDB is also fine if that is what you already know or host elsewhere

If you stay on SQLite:

• okay for small personal use
• not ideal for concurrent writes, larger scale, or operational robustness

Practical recommendation for this project

If this app is going to be a real production service on Ubuntu:

• move to PostgreSQL first if possible
• MariaDB is still a reasonable option if preferred

Deployment flow

1. push to main
2. Gitea Actions runs tests
3. if green, workflow uploads repo to server
4. deploy/deploy.sh links /opt/job-tracker/shared/.env into the repo checkout, then runs docker compose build && docker compose up -d
5. if OLLAMA_MODEL is set, the deploy script waits for Ollama, pulls the configured model if missing, then restarts ai-service so hybrid CV classification can use it
6. workflow checks service status after deployment

Post-deploy verification you should also do manually the first time

• confirm reverse proxy routes to the frontend correctly
• confirm API auth/login works with production config
• confirm backend can connect to MariaDB
• confirm AI service container is reachable from backend
• confirm reminder and admin/system pages load
• verify follow-up reminder emails are enabled only when intended and that links open the correct job/tab hat links open the correct job/tab

---

Backups, restore and rollback

Database restore and application rollback are two different operations. A bad deploy usually needs only the rollback. Restore the database only if the data itself is wrong or lost — it discards everything written since the dump.

Environment loading

deploy/deploy.sh loads /opt/job-tracker/shared/.env into its own shell before it decides anything. The symlink it creates in the checkout is for docker compose, which reads .env itself; the script needs the values too, to pick the right backup and to check its own configuration.

• Parsed line by line, not sourced — a compose .env is not a shell script, so an unquoted value containing spaces would execute as a command.
• Variables already set in the environment win, so CI-provided APP_VERSION, APP_COMMIT_SHA and APP_BUILD_STAMP still override the file.
• No value is ever echoed. Error messages name variables, never their contents.

This was added on 2026-07-19. Before it, the script read an empty environment: DATABASE_PROVIDER fell back to sqlite on a MariaDB host, so the deploy tarred the data volume, printed Backup verified, and continued with no database dump at all. See docs/release-candidate-review.md (B1).

Required production variables

validate_deploy_config runs before the backup, and therefore before anything is built, stopped or replaced. A missing variable aborts the deploy while the running stack is still untouched.

Variable	Required	Why it is checked here
DATABASE_PROVIDER	Always — no default	Selects the backup. Guessing it wrong backs up the wrong database and reports success
JOBTRACKER_CONNECTION_STRING	When provider is mariadb/mysql	Without it there is no way to dump the database
AI_SERVICE_TOKEN	Always	docker-compose.yml declares it with :?; missing it kills the stack after the images are built
AUTH_JWT_KEY	Always	Compose sets Auth__Require=true, and the backend throws at startup on a blank key — after the containers have been replaced
APP_PUBLIC_BASE_URL	Optional	If unset the post-deploy public smoke check is skipped, and the script says so rather than skipping silently

DATABASE_PROVIDER deliberately has no default. An unset value used to mean "sqlite"; it now means "stop and tell me".

Backup creation

deploy/deploy.sh takes a backup before it builds, stops or replaces anything, and aborts the deploy if the backup fails. Nothing else in the deploy runs without a restore point.

• Location: /opt/job-tracker/backups — override with BACKUP_DIR. If an earlier root-run deploy owns the directory, the deploy script repairs its ownership through Docker before writing.
• Selection: driven solely by DATABASE_PROVIDER, which must be set.
  • mariadb / mysql → SQL dump, jobtracker-<database>-<UTC timestamp>.sql.gz, e.g. jobtracker-jobtracker-20260719T153759Z.sql.gz
  • sqlite → data volume archive, jobtracker-sqlite-<UTC timestamp>.tar.gz
  • anything else → the deploy stops
• The filename tells you which path ran. If you expect a MariaDB deploy and find a jobtracker-sqlite-*.tar.gz, the environment is wrong — that is the exact failure this check exists to make visible.
• Naming: the UTC timestamp makes every file unique, so a deploy never overwrites an earlier backup.
• Credentials come from JOBTRACKER_CONNECTION_STRING and are passed via MYSQL_PWD, never on the command line, so they cannot appear in the process list or the deploy log.
• Compression: gzip. A small database compresses to a few KB.
• SQLite volume resolution: compose prefixes volume names with the project name, so the script resolves <project>_jobtracker_data and fails if that volume does not exist. Naming the bare volume would silently create an empty one and back that up.

Verification — each provider gets the check that proves its own format

A backup that exists but is empty, truncated, or the wrong kind is worse than none, because it looks like a restore point.

Provider	Checks
MariaDB	non-empty; valid gzip; contains CREATE TABLE; contains the Dump completed trailer that mariadb-dump writes last, so a dump that died partway through is rejected
SQLite	non-empty; valid gzip; the archive actually contains jobtracker.db

A failed check deletes the file rather than leaving something that looks like a backup.

Taking one by hand

BACKUP_DIR=/opt/job-tracker/backups
mkdir -p "$BACKUP_DIR"
MYSQL_PWD='<password>' mariadb-dump \
  --host=127.0.0.1 --port=3306 --user=<user> \
  --single-transaction --routines --events --quick \
  jobtracker | gzip -c > "$BACKUP_DIR/jobtracker-manual-$(date -u +%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ).sql.gz"

Retention

Nothing is deleted automatically. Backups accumulate in BACKUP_DIR until you remove them. Watch disk usage and prune deliberately — a suggested policy is to keep every backup for 30 days and one per month after that, but the script does not enforce it and will not delete your files.

Restoring the database

Tested end-to-end against a clean MariaDB 11 container: dump taken from a seeded database, restored into an empty one, rows verified identical.

# 1. Stop the application so nothing writes during the restore.
docker compose stop backend

# 2. Restore. This REPLACES the current contents of the named database.
gzip -dc /opt/job-tracker/backups/jobtracker-jobtracker-20260719T153759Z.sql.gz \
  | MYSQL_PWD='<password>' mariadb --host=127.0.0.1 --port=3306 --user=<user> jobtracker

# 3. Verify before starting anything.
MYSQL_PWD='<password>' mariadb --host=127.0.0.1 --port=3306 --user=<user> jobtracker \
  -e "SELECT COUNT(*) AS applications FROM JobApplications;"

# 4. Start again.
docker compose start backend

Restoring a SQLite deployment instead:

docker compose stop backend
docker run --rm -v jobtracker_data:/data -v /opt/job-tracker/backups:/backup \
  -e ARCHIVE_NAME=jobtracker-sqlite-20260719T153941Z.tar.gz \
  alpine:3 sh -c 'rm -rf /data/* && tar xzf "/backup/$ARCHIVE_NAME" -C /data'
docker compose start backend

Restoring application containers (rollback)

This is the usual fix for a bad deploy, and it does not touch the database.

cd /opt/job-tracker/app          # the deployment checkout
git log --oneline -5             # find the last good commit
git checkout <previous-commit>
deploy/deploy.sh

deploy.sh takes a fresh backup first, so rolling back is itself protected.

Why a code rollback is safe here: every Phase 4/5 migration is a no-op — the startup reconciler owns those tables — so reverting the code never leaves migration history ahead of the schema. The reconciler is additive and never drops a table holding rows, so the older code simply ignores the newer tables.

What a code rollback does not undo: rows users created in the newer tables stay. That is usually what you want. If you additionally restore the database, those rows are lost — so restore only when the data is the problem.

Choosing between them

Symptom	Action
New version starts but behaves wrong	Rollback the code. Leave the database.
Backend will not start; schema looks wrong	Rollback the code, then restore only if it still fails.
Data is missing or corrupted	Restore the database from the most recent good dump.
Deploy aborted before starting	Nothing to undo — the backup ran before any change.

Health checks

backend and frontend both report container health, so docker compose ps shows real state rather than merely "running".

• Backend: curl -fsS http://127.0.0.1:8080/health. Anonymous, and deliberately does not touch the database — a health check that queried MariaDB would restart a healthy backend whenever the database blipped. start_period is 90s to cover first-boot schema reconciliation.
• Frontend: wget against nginx on port 80.
• frontend waits for backend to be healthy, not merely started, because nginx proxies /api to it and refuses to start if the upstream cannot be resolved.

A backend that cannot reach its database exits and is reported unhealthy, so a broken deploy does not present as a running stack.