Pinning an app to the primary location isn't a fact about its storage,
it's a statement about whether the field is editable — so it belongs in
the comment, where the renderer's other display metadata already lives.
webui_generate_configs.sh already parses **ADVANCED** out of a field's
comment; **READONLY** parses the same way and needs no new key, no
engine-side list, and no special case in appDir or the migrate path. It
also has uses beyond this feature: crowdsec.config:72 warns that editing
a field does nothing, next to an editable input.
Also records why CFG_<APP>_STORAGE holds a location name rather than a
path, since it's the kind of decision that gets relitigated: mount paths
move (relabel, /media/<user>/…, a different session) and a name means
re-registering once instead of rewriting every app config; and migrate's
central question — "this host has no such location, where should it go?"
— is a registry lookup, not a string comparison. The config stores intent,
the manifest stores fact. Unlike backup locations there's no case for a
custom-path override: root only touches registered roots, so a path
outside the registry is unusable rather than merely discouraged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three refinements that make the plan smaller rather than bigger, plus
an honest accounting of what stays awkward.
The .libreportal-storage marker now does three jobs instead of one:
admission, mount detection and migrate provenance. Marker-lives-on-the-
drive replaces the findmnt/REQUIRE_MOUNT/fs_uuid guard family with a
single file read, and it covers cases those miss — a LUKS volume that
was never unlocked, a dropped network mount. It also unblocks adopting
a drive that already holds app data, which strict emptiness forbade;
that relaxation is free, because planting a marker requires write
access you'd have to already have.
appDir becomes the one place availability is checked, so an absent
drive fails centrally instead of needing a guard at 200 callers. And
the sweep verifies itself: retire containers_dir to a sentinel path so
survivors fail loudly on something that cannot exist.
Pinning infra apps becomes CFG_<APP>_STORAGE_PINNED, mirroring
MULTI_INSTANCE, rather than a hardcoded list in the engine.
New §9 records the four things that don't get a clean answer: the
TOCTOU window and the parent-writability restriction that closes it,
two registries that will look like one, a 90-file diff that only
process makes safe, and large moves simply being slow.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Proposal for turning the single containers root into a registry of
locations, with each app choosing one — so bulk data can live on a
second disk or an external drive while the control plane stays put.
Records what the codebase already gives us for free (relative compose
volumes, self-describing app dirs, the backup-locations pattern), the
~200 call sites that must move behind an appDir() resolver, and the
one constraint that shapes everything: the root helpers bake their
paths at install precisely so the manager cannot redirect a root
chown, so the location registry has to be root-owned with an
empty-directory admission rule.
Also notes a latent bug found while checking: restore builds its
include path from the LOCAL containers root, so migrating between
hosts with different --containers-dir values silently restores nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
