The Backup step opened with an empty box and /mnt/usb/libreportal-backups as
the placeholder — a path nobody has, presented as the shape of the answer.
Someone rebuilding a server was being asked to recall from memory the one thing
they came here because they had lost.
Two additions, and the point of both is that neither needs the repository
password. A restic repository keeps one file per snapshot under snapshots/, so
"is there a backup here, and how many" is a directory listing. Nothing is
decrypted — reading what is IN those snapshots is the next step, and that does
need the password.
restore scan looks where a backup actually is: this install's own backups root
(the disk often survives), every location the install already knows about, and
one level under each non-OS mount, a just-plugged-in drive being the other half
of "the system drive died". Bounded to named shapes and maxdepth 1, never a
filesystem walk — a scan nobody waits for is a scan nobody uses. Results are
buttons, most snapshots first, each showing its count and the age of its
newest snapshot; clicking one fills the path in.
restore verify <path> answers the same for a typed path. Its most useful answer
is the near-miss: pointing at the folder that CONTAINS the repositories rather
than at one of them, which it names and offers as a button rather than
explaining the distinction in prose.
A repository is recognised by config plus the snapshots, keys and data
directories together. config alone would match any folder with a file of that
name, and offering a stray directory as someone's backup is worse than finding
nothing.
The placeholder now comes from this machine — the first repository found, or
the install's own backups root — since a placeholder's job is to show the shape
of the answer and only a real one does that. The backups root is in the storage
feed for it.
The found entries are buttons and had to own their geometry: .setup-app-card
carries no layout, it is a bare wrapper elsewhere, so a <button> wearing it
collapsed to one cramped line.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things about the restore source step were wrong.
The progress bar said "Source" while the heading said "Where is your backup?",
which reads as two different steps. Every other step's section title is its step
name — Storage, Backups, Import — so this one is "Backup" in both places, with
the friendly question moved to the hint where the rest of the wizard puts it.
Contents and Rebuild got the same treatment.
And the fields used the Storage step's label-left rows. That layout suits a
column of dropdowns; a form of typed values in the middle of a wizard that
looks nothing like the rest of it just reads as unfinished. They now use the
same shape as Identity: a label with a tooltip, then an icon beside the input.
Every field has both, including the password.
On automating the relocate: it cannot be a WebUI action, and the reason is the
thing the privilege model rests on. Root helpers have their paths baked at
install so the manager cannot redirect a privileged operation by editing
something it owns; relocating re-bakes those paths, so a helper that did it
from a caller-supplied path would hand the manager the whole trust boundary.
Narrowing to "registry targets only" does not help either — the manager can add
to that registry by design. libreportal-relocate says this at the top and is
deliberately outside the manager's sudoers.
What was fixable is the part that actually annoyed — being handed a command
with no idea whether it worked:
- Copy button, with a fallback that selects the text and names the keys,
because clipboard access needs a secure context and a LAN install on
http:// is not one.
- The pending move persists to localStorage, not session state: it happens in
a terminal minutes or days later, after the tab is gone.
- A watcher on every page shows the outstanding command, polls for the move
landing, and reloads to the homepage — whatever route you were on belonged
to the old install.
"Landed" means the host REPORTS its system dir as the target, which is why
system_dir is now in storage.json. Deliberately not "the server restarted": an
ordinary container restart is indistinguishable, and announcing a relocation
that never happened is worse than saying nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A repository holds one system=config snapshot and one snapshot per app. They
are separate because they are used separately: the settings tree is small,
changes rarely and is meaningless per-app, while app data is large, changes at
its own rate, and has to be restorable, movable and ageable on its own — which
is what the per-app tag buys.
The step listed "Apps" and "Domains" as peer sections, which hid that entirely.
It read as though a backup held three kinds of thing, and gave no clue that the
domains come OUT of the system snapshot rather than being a third kind.
Now: a Settings section (one snapshot, dated, saying plainly that it carries
every backup repository with its credentials and is restored first because it
is what makes the others reachable) with the domains nested under it and each
one's DNS verdict; then an App data section, one snapshot each, dated and
sized. A repository with app data and no settings snapshot says so — the
consequence, that repositories and logins do not come back, is not something to
find out afterwards.
restoreInspect emits that shape now, assembled with jq against the discover
JSON rather than by hand-rolled string concatenation, and carries each
snapshot's date: a backup's age is what people actually judge it by.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Third occurrence of the same defect, in a third directory. config-adopt gave a
file the destination did not already have 0640 — "these can hold secrets, so
default closed" — but the config tree is 0755 and the backup account reads all
of it. One 0640 file makes restic report permission denied, write an INCOMPLETE
snapshot and exit 3, so the entire system-config backup is reported failed, and
a first-run restore has nothing to restore from.
A new file now inherits from a sibling in the same directory, matching whatever
that tree's convention is rather than having a mode picked for it.
Since this has now happened three times for three unrelated reasons, the test
asserts the class rather than the instances: no file anywhere under configs/
may be unreadable by the backup account. Mutation-checked — chmod 0640 on any
one config makes it fail.
Also repaired the files the earlier buggy adoption runs clamped on this
install, and fixed lp-storage-step-test's hardcoded step index, which the new
Start step had shifted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The wizard's first question is now "is this a new server, or a replacement for
one?", which §2 of the roadmap described and nothing implemented. Start asks,
and the answer selects one of two disjoint step sets:
new Start > Experience > Identity > Domains > Storage > Backups
> Import > Recommended > (Metrics)
restore Start > Source > Contents > Rebuild
Disjoint deliberately. A restore is never asked for an install name, domains or
an app list — the backup answers all three, and asking invites someone to type
an answer that is about to be written over. The test asserts non-overlap in
both directions, not just that the restore steps appear.
Source collects the repository the way the Backup page does, minus everything
that only means something for a place you write TO: no retention, no schedule,
no enable toggle. The password leaves through the one-shot secret:<ref> channel
and is cleared from the DOM, and the test asserts the value never appears in
the payload — that payload reaches a task command line, and tasks are recorded
world-readable.
Contents is the reconciliation, rendered: apps with sizes, and each domain with
a verdict, checked through the same /api/setup/dns-check the Domains step uses
rather than adding a second way to ask. Plus the offer to leave the strays out
until DNS is repointed.
Rebuild runs `restore rebuild`: settings first (they carry every other
repository's credentials), then domains, then apps with no explicit list so
bulk discovers and re-preflights them itself.
Inserting Start shifted every step index by one. validateStep was a chain of
idx === 1 … idx === 6, carrying a comment that already explained which earlier
insertions had moved them — it is keyed on the step name now.
lp-storage-step-test had the same pin and did not survive: it called
validateStep(3) for Storage, which had become Domains, and reported that
nothing blocked. That reads exactly like validation being broken. Tests look
their step up by name now too.
Also: locationRemove's fix means a failed connect can finally clean up after
itself, so a wrong password no longer leaves a dead destination behind on every
retry.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
restore inspect answers "what would a restore from here bring?" without writing
anything: hosts, apps with sizes, and the domains — read out of the
system-config snapshot with engineDumpFile, the same way the preflight reads an
app manifest. Knowing a backup hands you six domains of which four point
elsewhere, before committing, is the difference between a rebuild and a
surprise.
restore connect is the WebUI entry point: creates the location from a base64
payload, redeems the repository password from the single-use secret channel,
inspects. Deliberately does not engineInitLocation — every other path that
creates a location initialises it because it is about to write there; this one
reads a repository that already exists. This is what unblocks the constraint
app_portable.sh records: a .lpapp could live in the WebUI because nothing
secret crosses from browser to host, and the repository restore could not. The
secret:<ref> channel is that missing piece.
A wrong password is the ordinary case and the user retries, so a failed connect
removes the location it just made. Otherwise every attempt left another
half-configured destination behind.
Three things found by using it:
- locationRemove never worked. It unlinked as the container user, but
configs/ is manager-owned, so it was always denied — and the result was
never checked, so isSuccessful printed anyway and a "removed" location came
back on the next listing. Now runInstallOp, and the directory is checked.
- webuiSecretSweep had no callers. An abandoned flow left its repository
password on disk forever. The sweep now runs in /api/setup/secret before
each write, tied to the one event guaranteed to happen.
- Adoption took the WebUI down. config-adopt chowned every adopted file to
manager:manager 0640, and webui_logins is bind-mounted into the container,
which then could not read its own credentials: exit 137 with no log line.
It also clamped every parent directory it passed through, closing
configs/webui and configs/backup to the container user.
The fix is a principle, not a special case: a restore replaces the CONTENT
of a config file and nothing else. The live install already knows who may
read each one. Adoption preserves the destination's ownership and mode,
defaults closed only for a file that did not exist, and never
re-permissions a directory it passes through.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The installer's restore path printed "Settings restored" and had never restored
a setting. backupRestoreSystemConfig only STAGES — right in general, since
overwriting a running control plane's config should not be automatic — but
nothing ever adopted the staged tree. The backup locations, domains and logins
landed in $restore_dir/system-config and stayed there.
So adoption is its own step now (`restore adopt`), allowed only on a machine
with nothing on it yet. backup/locations/ is adopted as a subtree, since the
index is part of the path and that directory is the whole point: it holds every
repository and its credentials, which is what makes "one password unlocks the
rest" true. Deliberately NOT adopted: the container account and its generated
password, port allocations, docker/rootless wiring, and storage/locations —
those describe the old machine, and a registry of drives this box does not have
would make every placement lookup resolve to a phantom.
The guard failed in the shape this project keeps hitting. It globbed the
containers directory, but the manager can traverse that without listing it, so
the glob returned a literal '*', the loop skipped it, and the function returned
"first run" on a machine with three apps. It adopted over a live install in
testing. It now asks the container user for the listing and fails closed: an
unreadable directory means "in use", never "empty".
Two config modes were inverted, found because a restore cannot restore from a
snapshot that was never taken:
- storage location configs were 0640 and hold no secrets. The backup runs as
the container user, could not read them, and restic wrote an INCOMPLETE
snapshot and exited 3 — so EVERY system-config backup failed once a second
storage location existed. Now 0644, with the test asserting they stay
secret-free so that mode remains defensible.
- backup location configs were 0644 and hold the repository password; nobody
could read them. They cannot simply be tightened, because the backup has to
read the credentials it uses — so the directory carries the restriction
(config-secure, manager:container 0750) and the file stays readable to the
two accounts that belong.
Fixing that surfaced a third: config-adopt clamped existing parent directories
to manager:manager 0750, closing configs/backup to the container user and
breaking the credential read the directory fix had just preserved.
restore domains reports which restored domains point here, and the installer
offers to drop the strays. Three verdicts, not two: setupCheckDomainPointsHere
falls back to hostname -I, and comparing a public A record to a private 10.x
address would condemn every correctly-pointed domain on a LAN-only box, which
is the deployment this product targets. Unverifiable is never offered for
deletion.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Restoring a real 13-app repository onto a fresh install: 11 came back working.
matrix failed because its install hook writes homeserver.yaml with the new DB
secret and the restore then lays the old one back over it; stoat failed because
rabbit's mnesia dir restores raw and the broker only honours
RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS on an empty data dir.
Apps with a dump descriptor are unaffected — those clear the data dir so the
engine initialises with the current secret, then replay the dump. That is the
tell for what the general fix has to look like.
Not implemented: applying the restored system config on first run changes what a
restore does with credentials (including the WebUI login), which is a decision,
not a defect. Written up as §3.6 with a recommendation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
grafana restored and then died with "attempt to write a readonly database",
repeatedly. Its database is recorded in the snapshot as 231543:1002 and landed
as 1002:1002 — the owner was lost, so grafana, running as 231543, could not
write it at mode 0640.
Restore runs as the backup user with no CAP_CHOWN, so it reinstates ownership
inside a user namespace. The prefix was
unshare --map-root-user --map-users=SUB:SUB:N --map-groups=SUB:SUB:N
and unshare accepts ONE range per option, so the backup user's own GID was never
mapped — while app data is written as <container-uid>:<backup-user>. The group
half of every such chown referred to an unmapped id, lchown returned EINVAL, and
the file kept the restoring user's ownership. restic reports those as "ignoring
error ..." and still exits 0, so nothing failed: 1626 of one 13-app restore's
2086 failed chowns were grafana's, under a restore that reported success.
restic-userns-exec uses newuidmap/newgidmap, which write the multi-range maps
unshare cannot express:
uid: 0 <- caller inner root, or caps are dropped at exec
SUB.. <- SUB.. identity, so restic can name the stored uid
gid: caller <- caller identity: the group half of app-data chowns
SUB.. <- SUB.. identity
The caller's own UID is deliberately not identity-mapped — that slot is spent on
inner root — and a file stored as <caller>:<caller> lands owned by the caller
anyway, because that is who inner root is outside. So the one case this cannot
map is the one case needing no mapping. `unshare --map-auto --map-current-user`
is not a shortcut: it maps the subuid range to low inner ids while restic needs
identity. Tested.
Measured live, restoring grafana: failed chowns 1626 -> 12 (the 12 being the
caller's own files, correct), grafana.db back to 231543:1002, grafana up and
writing. Falls back to running the command plainly when there is no subuid
range, no newuidmap, or the namespace will not start.
scripts/dev/lp-userns-ownership-test pins all three ownership cases; verified
the old prefix fails it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
resticRestoreSnapshot forgives the un-mappable-uid lchown failures so a restore
is not aborted by them, and reported: "expected, they are already owned
correctly". That is true only for LibrePortal's own files, whose owner is the
backup user restic already runs as. It is false for container-owned data.
_resticUsernsPrefix maps the subuid range and root, but unshare takes one range
per option so the backup user's own GID is never mapped — and app data is
written as <container-uid>:<backup-user>. Every such chown fails with EINVAL and
the file falls back to <backup-user>:<backup-user>. Verified directly:
231543:231543 applies, 231543:1002 does not.
Observed on a 13-app restore: grafana's grafana.db is recorded as 231543:1002
and landed as 1002:1002, so grafana (running as 231543) could not write it at
mode 0640 and died with "attempt to write a readonly database" — under a restore
that reported success. 1626 of that run's 2086 failed chowns were grafana's.
This commit does not fix the mapping — that is the backup engine's ownership
handling rather than the first-run restore path, and the candidate fixes
(newuidmap multi-range maps, or restoring as root via a path-validated helper)
want a decision first. See docs/roadmap/first-run-restore.md §3.5. What it fixes
is the reporting: count the files and say plainly that container-owned data was
not reinstated and the app may fail to write.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`restore system` reported
✓ Success System config restored to: /libreportal-system/restore/system-config
for a directory that did not exist. Nothing had been written — on the step the
whole restore ordering depends on, since the system config carries every other
backup location's credentials.
Restore stages through $SYSTEM_DIR, which the manager owns, but the thing that
writes into the staging tree is restic, and runBackupOp runs it as the container
user. Both call sites created the directory as the wrong principal, in opposite
directions:
backupRestoreSystemConfig runFileOp mkdir -> container user; denied on the
0751 manager-owned restore_dir, and unchecked
storageRestoreAppTo runInstallOp mkdir -> manager; restic could then
not create anything beneath it
Restic reports a permission denial as "ignoring error ..." and still exits 0, so
the callers' success checks were satisfied either way.
libreportal-ownership gains restore-stage (creates it cowner:MANAGER 0750 —
owner writes, manager traverses to confirm and review) and restore-unstage
(removes it; neither principal can, so staging trees simply accumulated). Both
confine the path to one component directly under the restore/migrate area.
footprint_version 8 -> 9.
backupRestoreSystemConfig now verifies the tree landed as the user that wrote
it, because the manager cannot read inside its own staging directory.
Verified on a live install: system config stages 57 real files, and the
relocation branch of storageRestoreAppTo ran for the first time — speedtest
restored from a snapshot taken at /libreportal-containers/speedtest into
/libreportal-alt/speedtest via stage-and-move, staging cleaned up afterwards.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
scripts/dev/lp-cli-argv-test builds stubs from the real invocation line in
init.sh and the real LP_CLI_ARGS line in start.sh, then pushes thirteen app
names through them — so editing either file is what makes it fail. Verified
against both regressions: dropping "$@" from the wrapper, and reading "$@"
instead of "${@:10}" in start.sh.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both were checks whose failure mode was to not run, and both produced output
indistinguishable from a healthy report. Worth writing down as a shape rather
than as two bugs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`libreportal app export <app>` writes one app to a single file;
`libreportal app import <file>` installs it here. This is the thing the
original request described as "upload or navigate to the backup file" — a
restic repository is not a file, but the want behind the phrasing is real.
The format is deliberately boring: gzipped tar of the app directory with
its .libreportal-manifest.json at the root. That manifest already records
size, images, volumes, databases and storage location, so import reuses
the phase-3 checks for free — refusing an app this version no longer
ships, or one that will not fit, before unpacking anything.
Export stops the app first. A tar of a running Postgres is a corrupt
Postgres, and a file that looks fine until you restore it is worse than a
refusal. tar runs as the owning user with --numeric-owner so container
sub-UIDs survive the round trip instead of being remapped through this
machine's /etc/passwd.
Import re-runs the normal install pipeline after unpacking, because the
compose still carries the SOURCE machine's ports, IPs and domains — that
pipeline is what re-allocates them here, and migrateUrlRewrite fixes the
host-bound CFG_* fields.
Documented throughout as a courier format, not a backup: no history, no
retention, no encryption. Importing under a different name is refused
outright rather than half-working — the CFG_<APP>_* namespace and compose
identities would all need rewriting, and `instance create` already
answers "a second copy".
Fixes a bug this surfaced: _appDirIntended did an indirect expansion on
CFG_<SLUG>_STORAGE without checking <SLUG> can be a variable name, so a
hyphenated or mistyped app name emitted "invalid variable name" and then
reported the misleading "storage location is not mounted" for an app that
simply did not exist.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`restore preflight <loc_idx> <host>` reads every app's manifest out of its
own snapshot (engineDumpFile pulls a single file without restoring) and
checks it against this machine before anything is written:
* an app this version no longer ships is skipped — restoring one
produces a directory that can never start, and looks like success
until someone opens it
* an app that will not fit is skipped individually, because filling the
disk part-way through takes the apps that already landed with it
* a manifest naming a storage location this machine lacks falls back to
the default, and says which app moved where
The installer's restore path runs it and asks once before continuing.
Two bugs found by running it against the live repository rather than
reading it:
The CLI dispatcher calls handlers with NO arguments, so `shift 4; "$@"`
inside one operates on an empty list. `restore first-run bulk` has always
had this — a bulk restore silently received zero apps. Fixed at the entry
point: start.sh now captures LP_CLI_ARGS from "$@", and both call sites
use it.
And the wrapper fills unset argv slots with the literal string "empty"
(${5:-empty} … ${9:-empty}), so a trailing slot arrives as a five-
character app name rather than a blank. Filtering on -n alone let five
phantom apps through and reported each as "no longer shipped". Both call
sites now drop the sentinel. That also caps any explicit list at five, so
preflight discovers the host's apps itself when given none.
Verified against the live repository: 13 apps discovered and checked.
Sizes read "?" there because those snapshots predate manifests carrying
size_bytes — the intended graceful fallback, not a refusal.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Phases 3 and 4 were written when the restore was going to be a WebUI
wizard branch. It runs in the installer now, so both change shape.
Reconciliation stops being a screen and becomes a preflight report. The
key realisation is that it can run BEFORE anything is written: every
app's snapshot carries its own .libreportal-manifest.json, and
engineDumpFile already pulls a single file out of a snapshot without
restoring it. So the installer can read all the manifests, compare them
to this machine, and print a verdict per app — skipping an app whose
template this version no longer ships, or whose data will not fit, rather
than restoring something unstartable.
Phase 4 is now the thing the original request actually described. 'Upload
or navigate to the backup file' does not match a restic repository, but
the want behind it is real: one file, one app, hand it around.
'libreportal app export/import' with a .lpapp (tar.gz of the app dir plus
its manifest) serves it directly, gets §3's reconciliation for free, and
gives the installer a third answer to 'where is your backup?'. Documented
as a courier format, explicitly not a backup.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Phase 1 is built. Phase 2 hit a blocker worth deciding rather than
silently working around.
The WebUI cannot run restic, so a password typed in the browser has to
reach the host. Both existing channels leak it. The task command string —
which is what the Backup page ALREADY uses for this exact field — lands in
a task JSON under frontend/data/tasks at 0644, world-readable, and shows
in ps while the task runs. A file in that directory does not work either:
the container writes as dockerinstall, the manager runs as libreportal,
and at 0640 the manager cannot read it (verified on the live box).
So this is an existing product-wide weakness that the restore branch
happens to surface, not one the feature would introduce — and the restore
case is its sharpest form, since that password is the key to every backup
the user has.
Recommends a one-shot secret drop: the ownership helper already solves the
mirror-image case (_webui_bind_access chowns MANAGER:cowner 0640 so the
container can read manager-owned files), so the reverse is a small,
well-scoped addition — a directory owned cowner:MANAGER 0730 that the
container drops a 0640 file into, which the manager reads once and
unlinks. Worth doing because it also fixes the Backup page.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Proposal for making "I'm rebuilding my server" a first-class first-run
path. Recording it before building because the useful finding is how
little is actually missing.
The restore machinery is already there: locationAdd connects a repo,
restoreFirstRunDiscover reads it without touching live state,
migrateDiscoverHosts/Apps enumerate what is in it, backupRestoreSystemConfig
brings settings and credentials back, restoreFirstRunBulk restores many
apps from another host, migrateUrlRewrite fixes host-bound CFG_* fields,
and storageRestoreAppTo already handles a snapshot whose paths don't
match this machine. What is missing is the front door and one screen.
That screen is the reconciliation diff — a backup describes a machine
that no longer exists, and the failure mode worth designing against is
re-deciding those facts silently. Every difference is detectable before
anything is written: a storage location that doesn't exist here, an app
bigger than the target drive, domains pointing at the old host, ports
already taken, apps this version no longer ships.
Two things the doc is deliberately blunt about.
An encrypted repository cannot be opened with anything inside itself. The
location password lives in the system config, which is inside the backup,
so on a fresh machine the user must supply it by hand — that is what
encryption means, not a bug. It has to be asked for early, because a user
who never wrote it down does not have a backup and should learn that at
step 2 rather than step 5.
And "upload the backup file" doesn't match the engines: restic, borg and
kopia write to a repository, not a file. Local means navigating to a path;
remote means credentials. A genuine single-file import is a separate
feature (a portable per-app export built on the manifest) and shouldn't
be conflated with the backup engines.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
librelad