Found on the actual first deployment: /api/v1/healthz proves the process is up, but says nothing about whether login actually works, because the session cookie is set with Secure in production. Test through a plain-HTTP address (an IP, a bare port, skipping the reverse proxy) and /auth/login still returns 200 with a valid body — the cookie is just silently dropped by the client, so the very next request looks unauthenticated. From a browser this looks exactly like "I logged in and it bounced me straight back to the login screen," with no error anywhere to point at. scripts/smoke-test.sh does the real round trip a browser does: login, confirm a session cookie was actually stored (not just sent), then an authenticated follow-up request confirming it succeeds and returns the right account. Verified it actually catches what it's meant to catch before committing: ran it against a throwaway account over plain HTTP against a production-mode container and got the expected FAIL with a diagnostic pointing at the Secure-cookie mismatch, then confirmed PASS once the container's VELODROME_ENVIRONMENT was (inadvertently, in this case) development instead. Documented in deploy/README.md as the real post-deploy check, replacing "hit /healthz and eyeball it" for anything involving auth. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01R2ZKeWkZV7ehf7fivrAkkG
deploy/
Everything needed to run Velodrome as one container. See docs/DECISIONS.md D15 (why SQLite
and one container) and D16 (why migrations run from the entrypoint, and the Caddy/tini setup)
before changing anything here.
../Dockerfile Multi-stage build: web SPA + API venv + Caddy, into one runtime image
Caddyfile Serves the static SPA, proxies /api/* to uvicorn on loopback
entrypoint.sh Runs migrations, then supervises uvicorn + Caddy as PID 1's children
unraid-template.xml Unraid Community Applications template — turns the env vars below into
fillable web UI fields instead of a .env file
There is no docker-compose here, deliberately — the app is one container, not a set of services
that need orchestrating together. (Later phases may add genuinely separate containers — a
tileserver, a local LLM — see docs/PLAN.md's "Service topology"; those would get their own
compose file or Unraid templates when a phase actually needs one, not speculatively now.)
Build
From the repo root (the build context — the Dockerfile needs both apps/api and apps/web):
docker build -t velodrome .
Run
docker run -d \
--name velodrome \
-p 8080:8080 \
-v velodrome-data:/data \
-e VELODROME_PUBLIC_URL=https://bikes.example.com \
-e VELODROME_SECRET_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 32) \
-e VELODROME_ENVIRONMENT=production \
velodrome
Put a TLS-terminating reverse proxy (whatever's already fronting other services on the host) in front of port 8080 — this container only ever serves plain HTTP itself.
GET http://<host>:8080/api/v1/healthz should return {"status": "ok"} once it's up.
Create the first admin user
A fresh deployment has no users and you cannot sign up for one. Registration requires an invite
code, invites are issued by an existing admin, and a new database has neither — so the first account
is created from inside the container (docs/DECISIONS.md D18 for why it's a CLI and not a
first-run web page):
docker exec -it velodrome velodrome create-admin --email you@example.com
That prompts for the password twice and prints the new account's id, email and role. Then log in at
VELODROME_PUBLIC_URL. Note the -t — without a TTY there's nothing to prompt on; the command
says so rather than hanging. Add --name "Your Name" to set a display name (it defaults to the part
of the email before the @); it's editable in the UI later either way.
For a non-interactive run (a provisioning script), pipe the password in instead — note -i rather
than -it:
printf '%s' "$ADMIN_PASSWORD" | docker exec -i velodrome \
velodrome create-admin --email you@example.com --password-stdin
There is deliberately no --password flag: an argument would land in your shell history, in ps
output, and in the Docker daemon's record of the exec'd command.
Re-run it with a different --email to add another admin. Re-running it with an email that already
exists refuses and changes nothing — it is not a password-reset tool, and there isn't one yet
(D18). Minimum password length is 8 characters, the same rule the register endpoint applies.
Nothing enforces the admin role yet — no admin-only endpoint exists — so today this differs from an invited account only in the role recorded on it. Invite management in a later phase is what starts reading it.
Verify login actually works, not just that the API responds
GET /api/v1/healthz proves the process is up. It does not prove a real login works, because
the session cookie is set with Secure in production (apps/api/velodrome/api/v1/auth.py) —
browsers silently refuse to store a Secure cookie unless the request was actually served over
HTTPS. Test through a plain-HTTP address (an IP, a bare port, skipping the reverse proxy) and
/auth/login still returns 200 with a valid response body; the cookie is just quietly dropped, so
the very next request looks unauthenticated. From a browser this looks exactly like "I logged in
and it bounced me straight back to the login screen," with nothing that looks like an error. This
happened on the very first real deployment.
scripts/smoke-test.sh exists so this is caught by running a command, not by refreshing a browser
tab:
scripts/smoke-test.sh https://bike.bbergle.com you@example.com yourpassword
It logs in, confirms a session cookie was actually stored (not just sent), then makes an authenticated follow-up request and confirms it succeeds and returns the right account. Run it after every real deploy, against the actual public URL your users will use — testing against a plain-HTTP IP will (correctly) tell you nothing about whether login works for anyone using the real domain.
Environment variables
All read by apps/api/velodrome/config.py (prefix VELODROME_) — the app and Alembic both read
the same values, there's no separate migration-time config anymore (docs/DECISIONS.md D15).
| Variable | Required | Default (baked into the image) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
VELODROME_DATABASE_URL |
No — don't override | sqlite+aiosqlite:////data/velodrome.db |
Fixed to the /data volume mount. Change the volume mapping, not this. |
VELODROME_PUBLIC_URL |
Yes | none | The externally-visible URL. Checked against Origin on cookie-authenticated mutations — get this wrong and every logged-in write silently 403s. |
VELODROME_SECRET_KEY |
Yes | insecure dev placeholder | openssl rand -hex 32. Not yet used for anything reachable (arrives with Bryton credential encryption in a later phase) — set a real value now anyway. |
VELODROME_ENVIRONMENT |
Yes | development |
development | test | production. Gates the session cookie's Secure flag — always production behind real HTTPS. |
VELODROME_SESSION_TTL_DAYS |
No | 90 |
Login session lifetime. |
VELODROME_SESSION_COOKIE_NAME |
No | vd_session |
Only matters if it collides with another app on the same domain. |
Volumes
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
/data |
The SQLite database file. Will also hold the content-addressed blob store once Phase 1 builds ingestion. This is the only thing that needs backing up. |
The container runs as a fixed non-root user (uid/gid 999), not root and not Unraid's usual
nobody:users (99:100). If /data's host directory doesn't already exist, Docker/Unraid creates
it owned by nobody:users with no write access for other users — the container starts, but
uvicorn fails immediately with sqlite3.OperationalError: unable to open database file, since it
can't create the SQLite file inside a directory it can't write to. Fix once, before first start:
chown -R 999:999 <host path> (e.g. /mnt/user/appdata/velodrome on Unraid).
Unraid
Import unraid-template.xml from the Docker tab's "Add Container" template picker — it exposes
the Port, Data path, and the env vars above as fillable web UI fields, matching the earlier
decision to keep configuration in Unraid's own UI rather than a .env file on disk. Every field
stays editable by hand afterward regardless of what the template pre-fills.
Publishing the image
.gitea/workflows/release.yml builds this Dockerfile and pushes it to the Gitea container
registry at registry.bbergle.com:9537/bbergle/bike-app on every push to main (tagged
main-<short-sha>, and latest), on a v* tag push (tagged with the tag name, and latest), or
on manual workflow_dispatch (tagged manual-<timestamp>-<short-sha> only — a manual dispatch
never moves latest, so testing a feature branch can't clobber what's actually deployable). Not
192.168.0.3:3000 (Gitea's own plain-HTTP address) directly — Docker
refuses any non-localhost registry over plain HTTP by default, so registry.bbergle.com:9537 is
an NPMplus proxy host in front of Gitea's registry that terminates TLS with a self-signed cert.
See docs/DECISIONS.md D17 for the full setup (cert, NPMplus proxy host, certs.d trust, and the
buildx driver change this required) — none of it is committed here, since it's host-local trust
material and NPMplus config, not something this repo can or should own.
It does not SSH into the host and recreate the running container — rolling out a new image on Unraid (pulling it and clicking "Apply" on the container, or via Unraid's own update-checking) is left as a manual/Unraid-side step, not something CI does unattended.
What's not here yet
Backups (docs/PLAN.md calls for a systemd timer running restic against /data, independent of
CI) and the import_inbox USB-watch bind mount are both Phase 1+ concerns — nothing in the schema
uses them yet.