VAPID: the two values are the halves of one P-256 keypair, not independent
secrets — the browser verifies that a push is signed by the private key matching
the public key it subscribed with. The RANDOMIZED* generators mint each
placeholder on its own, so they produced two unrelated strings and web push could
never have worked. Generate the pair in mastodon_install_post_setup the way stoat
already does, encoded as Mastodon's webpush gem expects: unpadded URL-safe base64
of the 32-byte private scalar and the 65-byte uncompressed public point, sliced
out of the SEC1 DER. Verified by rebuilding the key from the emitted private half
and re-deriving the public point — openssl accepts it and the point matches.
Generated once and never rotated (rotation would invalidate every subscription),
but a pair of the wrong shape is replaced, so an install carrying the old
unrelated strings heals itself on next install — their public half is 42 chars
where a real point is 87.
Slots: CFG_<APP>_DB_PASSWORD -> CFG_<APP>_DB_PASSWORD_1 and likewise for
DB_ROOT_PASSWORD, across mastodon, owncloud, mattermost, matrix, nextcloud and
bookstack, so a database credential is always a numbered slot and a second one is
just _2. Renaming a key means reconciliation drops the old and adds the new
holding its placeholder, so an existing install regenerates unless the value is
carried over first — documented, including that the old file survives as
.<app>.config.bak.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five apps (mastodon, owncloud, mattermost, matrix, stoat) took their generated
secrets from the compose-side generator tags PASSWORD_TAG_<n>/RANDOM_TAG_<n>/
HEX_TAG_<n>/VAPID_TAG_<n>. Those mint a fresh secret on every templating run, so
a reinstall handed the app a new database password while its data volume kept the
one initdb was given, and the app came back up unable to open its own database.
Move them to <app>.config as RANDOMIZED* placeholders, reaching the compose via
the #LIBREPORTAL|<APP>_<KEY>_TAG| mechanism tags_processor_app_config_values
already provides. No new handler: the tag name is derived from the config key, so
this is a config line plus a tag per secret. Generation is unchanged — still
random on first install; the value is now remembered instead of re-rolled.
Also fixes two things this exposed:
- The RANDOMIZED* replacers matched unanchored. `sort -u` orders slots lexically
(1, 10, 11, 2), so slot 1's pattern rewrote the prefix inside slot 10's
placeholder and slots 10+ ended up holding slot 1's secret with a digit glued
on — derivable, and invisible because the values weren't byte-identical.
Anchoring with \b makes match order irrelevant. Verified at 20 slots across
all four placeholder types: 64 keys, 64 distinct values, no prefix collisions.
- generateRandomPassword drew from base64 without constraining the mix; measured
over 2000 draws, 1 in 40 contained no digit at all. Retry until the result has
both a digit and a letter, bounded so a pathological length can't spin.
owncloud gains a fix in passing: its compose seeded the admin account from
PASSWORD_TAG_2 while the WebUI displayed CFG_OWNCLOUD_ADMIN_PASSWORD, which was
generated separately and never used. Both now read the same value.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Synapse on Postgres plus the Element web client, on two subdomains: the
homeserver on matrix.<domain> (which becomes server_name, so IDs read
@alice:matrix.<domain>) and Element on element.<domain>.
Two hosts rather than one because server_name then matches the host Traefik
already terminates TLS for, so 'serve_server_wellknown: true' is all the
federation delegation needed and nothing has to be published at the apex
domain — which this app has no way to configure.
CFG_MATRIX_AUTHELIA is pinned false and documented: forward-auth in front of
/_matrix locks out every client and every federating peer, since they carry
Matrix access tokens and cannot follow a redirect. Real SSO goes through the
OIDC block in resources/homeserver.yaml instead.
The install hook generates the signing key once via upstream's own 'generate'
command and refuses to regenerate it over an existing install — a new key would
be rejected by every server that had cached the old one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
