Stalwart v0.16 does not ship the WebUI in its Docker image — the admin
console is fetched from GitHub on first start. With no outbound HTTPS at
that moment the fetch fails silently: /healthz/ready still answers 200
because the mail server genuinely is serving, so both the installer and
the upgrade verifier reported success while /admin and /account 404'd
with nothing to explain why.
Install hook now probes /admin after the port-25 and PTR checks and, on
404, names the GitHub download as the cause rather than emitting a
generic failure. Upgrade verifier treats stable readiness as necessary
but not sufficient and confirms /admin before returning 0; the console
is polled under the same deadline because the bundle download runs
behind the server coming up, and failing on the first 404 would abort an
upgrade that was seconds from finishing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Stepping 31 -> 32 -> 33 is arithmetic. Knowing 32 FINISHED before
touching 33 is the whole safety story, and it is invisible from outside
the app: Nextcloud runs its migration on boot and sits in maintenance
mode — or fails halfway — while Docker reports the container perfectly
healthy. Advance a rung there and a migration has been skipped on live
data.
Contract: <app>_upgrade_verify <app> <expected-tag> <deadline> -> 0
Returns 0 ONLY on positive confirmation that the app serves at the
expected version with nothing outstanding. Unhealthy, indeterminate and
timed-out all return non-zero — uncertainty is a failure, not a maybe,
because the alternative gambles with data.
nextcloud `occ status`: installed, NOT in maintenance, no pending DB
upgrade, and the running major matches the tag. Maintenance
mid-migration is expected and simply keeps waiting.
mastodon /health serving, ZERO "down" rows in db:migrate:status, and
the version from /api/v1/instance matching. /health alone is
insufficient — Puma answers before migrations finish.
stalwart /healthz/ready (per its documented probes), required to hold
stable rather than flash once. Weaker by design: the probes
confirm serving but report no version, and the file says so
rather than implying more.
updaterVerifyGeneric (running + healthy + no restart during a settle
window) is the fallback for everything else, and is explicitly NOT
sufficient to justify climbing a rung — the engine will refuse to ladder
an app with no declared verifier.
9 tests drive the dangerous states directly: maintenance mode, pending DB
upgrade, and a wrong major all correctly REFUSE to verify; clean states
pass. Those three negatives are the ones that would have corrupted data.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One container providing SMTP/IMAP/POP3/JMAP plus CalDAV/CardDAV, an admin
UI and spam filtering — chosen over mailcow (owns its own installer, which
is what killed the earlier attempt now sitting in scripts/unused/) and
over Mailu (~7 containers) because a single image with a single data dir
is the only shape that fits the existing conventions cleanly: one anchor
service the updater can version, one path the backup engine can snapshot.
Mail-specific departures from the usual app template, each deliberate:
* Ports are FIXED, not random. Other mail servers connect to :25 by
number and clients expect 465/587/993 — a randomised external port
would silently make the server unreachable. Only the admin UI takes a
random port, since that one really is just a browser behind Traefik.
143/995/4190/443 ship disabled; the port processor comments them out.
* UPDATE_TYPE=manual and the image pinned to v0.16, not :latest.
Stalwart is pre-1.0 and has said the storage schema is still being
finalised, so an unattended minor bump could carry a data migration on
the message store. This is the one app where the auto default is wrong.
* BACKUP_STRATEGY=stop-snapshot-start. The message store is written
continuously; a live copy can land mid-transaction. Seconds of queued
delivery (senders retry) buys a consistent snapshot.
* The install hook checks outbound port 25 and reverse DNS, then prints
the MX/SPF/DMARC records with real values. A mail server whose
container started is not a working mail server, and every remaining
requirement lives at the registrar or the VPS provider.
Admin credentials are seeded via STALWART_RECOVERY_ADMIN from the app
config rather than left to Stalwart's first-run random password, which
would otherwise exist only in the container log.
Icon is a drawn placeholder, not the upstream trademark.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
