A new Stalwart drops you into a five-screen wizard — hostname, domain,
storage backend, directory, logging, DNS — before it will do anything.
LibrePortal already knows the two answers that matter and the rest have
sane defaults, so asking is asking a question we can answer ourselves.
v0.16 exposes those wizard fields as a `Bootstrap` singleton, so the whole
thing is one `update` applied through the Stalwart CLI. The CLI is not in
the server image (upstream split it into its own repo), but it publishes a
multi-arch container, so we borrow the server's network namespace and run
it there — nothing installed on the host, nothing to clean up, arm64 works.
Setup now also:
- generates DKIM keys (Ed25519 + RSA) with rotation left switched on, and
requests a TLS certificate. That last one is easy to miss: Traefik only
fronts the admin port, so 25/465/587/993 never see its certificate and
clients would hit a self-signed one on 993.
- creates postmaster@<domain>. The generated zone points DMARC and TLS-RPT
reports there and nothing was creating it, so those reports bounced.
- prints the record set read back from the server rather than composed
here, so it includes the real DKIM public keys, MTA-STS, TLS-RPT and the
SRV records clients autoconfigure from. This hook used to tell the user
to go and fetch DKIM themselves; by that point the keys exist.
Optionally hands DNS to a provider API (Cloudflare/DigitalOcean/DeSEC),
which keeps the whole record set in sync and makes DKIM rotation safe to
leave on. Off by default: the token can write to your zone and lives in
the mail server's database.
Re-running is safe — provisioning is skipped once config.json exists, and
the plans use upsert so they reconcile rather than duplicate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
