Both apps demanded a domain and Traefik. That was over-constrained: LibrePortal
ships WireGuard, Headscale and private ports, so LAN and VPN-only is a
first-class deployment here, and Rocket.Chat and Mattermost already prove chat
apps work fine on http://<lan-ip>:<port>.
The gate on Matrix rested on a mistake of mine: server_name being permanent.
server_name and public_baseurl are independent — the identity can be a domain
you own with no DNS behind it while clients reach the server on a LAN address,
so federation can be switched on later by adding DNS and TLS, with no rebuild
and no lost history. CFG_MATRIX_SERVER_NAME now exposes exactly that, and the
install warns when it falls back to the machine's IP.
What is genuinely lost without a domain is stated where it belongs, at install:
Matrix cannot federate and Element's mobile apps want HTTPS; Stoat cannot do
camera or microphone, because browsers gate getUserMedia on a secure context
and a VPN does not change that, the check being on the URL scheme.
Both now derive their URL from the port that was actually allocated. Since ports
are only assigned during compose-up, each writes a best guess before start and
corrects it afterwards, restarting only when the value really changed.
Three bugs found while proving it works end to end:
- The Synapse image writes /data as its UID/GID env, default 991, which under
rootless is a host sub-UID owning nothing — so the generated signing key could
not be moved by the install user. Both the generate container and the service
now run as the same identity USER_TAG resolves to.
- Element's config.json is bind-mounted as a file, and docker silently creates a
DIRECTORY when the source is missing. An early return left exactly that
landmine, which then broke every later run. It is written first now, and a
stale directory is cleared.
- A successful admin registration was reported as an error: checkSuccess read $?
after an intervening [[ ]] test rather than the command's own status.
Verified with no domain and no Traefik installed: Synapse answers
/_matrix/client/versions and /health on http://<ip>:<port>, admin login returns
a token, and Element is configured against the corrected base_url.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both hooks read their host (and matrix its database password) back out of the
deployed docker-compose.yml. That cannot work: install_post_compose runs after
the compose TEMPLATE is copied but before dockerConfigSetupFileWithData fills
the tags, so at that point the file still holds raw placeholders. Matrix aborted
with "Database password was not generated in the compose file" even though the
password had been generated correctly — it just was not in the compose yet.
Derive the host from port_subdomains[0] + domain_full instead, both already in
scope from variables_init_app, applying the same empty/@/root rule as
tagsProcessorPortSubdomains so the computed name and the Traefik rule generated
later cannot drift apart. Matrix takes its database password from
CFG_MATRIX_DB_PASSWORD_1, which is where the secret is generated and remembered
and is the same variable the compose tag is filled from a step later.
The error messages now name the actual missing thing — the domain — rather than
blaming the compose file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sixteen containers: MongoDB, Valkey, RabbitMQ, MinIO and eleven Stoat services.
Servers, channels, roles and voice/video through LiveKit — the nearest thing in
the catalogue to Discord itself, at the price of being much the heaviest app in
it. Does not federate.
The compose service keys are deliberately kept identical to upstream's
(database, redis, api, autumn, ...) while container_name is prefixed stoat-.
Compose registers both on the network, so upstream's internal defaults keep
resolving and LibrePortal still gets the prefixed names its port, firewall and
backup layers key on.
Upstream's Caddy is kept as the internal path router and Traefik simply proxies
to it, which is upstream's own supported behind-a-reverse-proxy mode —
reimplementing eight path routes as Traefik labels would be a second copy to
keep in sync for nothing. The install hook is a non-interactive port of
generate_config.sh, and it never rewrites an existing secrets.env:
REVOLT__FILES__ENCRYPTION_KEY decrypts every file ever uploaded, so
regenerating it would orphan the whole media store.
LiveKit's UDP media range is published literally rather than through the port
table, because the firewall rebuild emits /tcp rules only and a range declared
there would produce a wrong rule rather than no rule. Voice falls back to TCP
7881 until the range is opened by hand; the post-install notice says so.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
