25 open recipe PRs had accumulated, and the list had stopped being readable: CI
sweep artifacts that were never meant to merge sat next to genuine CVE fixes, and
three PRs the operator had been told were outstanding were in fact already merged
upstream (discourse #6 with 140 CVEs, keycloak #6 with 12, n8n #5) — visible only
once the mirrors were reconciled.
The skill: reconcile every mirror from true upstream FIRST (that step alone closed
those three), survey every open PR deterministically, close the ones that cannot
merge or were never meant to, and report prioritised action items — CVE-carrying
first — for the ones that should land. It never merges a recipe PR.
pr-survey.py gathers the facts and decides nothing: behind_main, mergeable,
diff_files, which images the PR adds vs which are already pinned in main, the
newest !testme verdict, branch kind, age.
One correctness detail worth the extra state: a FAILED diff fetch is reported as
unknown, never as an empty diff. gitea #4 reads that way (force-pushed branch)
while being a verified green fix, and 'empty diff' is a close signal — so the
tool says DIFF-UNREADABLE(do not close on this) instead.
I recorded that recreating the runs directory with a fresh inode preceded
recovery. It recurred afterwards (build 1252), so that was not the fix.
The real signal is that it is INTERMITTENT and tracks concurrent activity: every
failure landed while a second run or manual deploy was in flight, and every build
on a quiet host passed (1243, 1250, 1251, 1253). Free space never moves during a
failing build. Practical guidance is therefore to wait for the host to go quiet
and re-trigger before calling it a recipe failure, and DRONE_RUNNER_CAPACITY=2 is
the obvious knob to test if it becomes disruptive.
Root cause still not established, and the note now says so plainly rather than
presenting a coincidence as understood.
Working against a stale mirror has cost us three different ways:
- mailu #6 was linked as the fix for two internet-facing Roundcube CVEs while
upstream had already merged AND released it (3.1.3+2024.06.57). The work was
done; only our mirror was behind. Reconciling closed the PR automatically.
- a stale mirror makes a survey report 'no upgrades available', so the recipe
silently drops out of the weekly run.
- reading the wrong branch: several coopcloud recipes keep a stale 'main' beside
the real default 'master'. gitea's main is 1.24.2-rootless while master has
1.27.1-rootless and the merged PRs, so reading main manufactures a false
'three releases behind, missing two CVSS-9.8 RCEs' finding.
The reconcile logic already existed inside open-recipe-pr.sh --reconcile-only and
already resolves the default branch itself. What was missing was a single obvious
entry point and a rule saying to run it. reconcile-upstream.sh takes recipes or
--all, and is idempotent — recipe work lives in branches, never on mirror main, so
force-syncing main discards nothing.
/ci-test-review and /cc-ci-tests-update had NO reconcile step at all; both now
require it. /cve-check, /recipe-upgrade and /upgrade-all already reconciled and now
point at the shared script.
Builds 1244-1249 died on mkdir of the run dir with 110GB free and 16% inodes.
Ruled out: actual disk (df sampled every 2s across a failing build never moved),
inodes, quotas, a poisoned parent directory (61/61 stress creations succeeded),
runner sandboxing (namespaces identical to the host), and a wedged runner
(restart changed nothing). The same harness with the same numeric run id, run by
hand outside drone, worked every time.
Recreating the runs directory with a fresh inode preceded recovery; builds have
run normally since. The root cause is NOT established, so the note says so rather
than presenting a fix that might be coincidence.
The CI server filled up and every !testme from build 1236 to 1242 died at harness
startup with ENOSPC on /var/lib/cc-ci-runs/<build>. Because the harness never got
far enough to write results.json, the PR badges just said 'failure' — so it read
as recipe regressions, and plausible's genuinely-fixed suite looked still-broken.
Cause: every run pulls each recipe's images and nothing ever removed the old ones.
72GB of images, 63GB of it unused. Reclaimed 69.8GB; the host went 73% -> 22%.
Two changes so it does not recur:
- sweep-orphans.sh (runs at the start AND end of every /upgrade-all) now prunes
unused images when the disk is >=60% (DISK_PRUNE_PCT). Below that it keeps the
layer cache so runs stay fast. 'docker image prune -a' spares anything a container
references, so infra and warm-* canonicals are safe. Volumes are still NOT
pruned — warm-* canonical volumes are data-warm and legitimately dangling.
- /cc-ci-status flags server disk at >65% rather than >80%, because this is not a
steady-state measure: the host was at 73% when runs started failing. It also now
checks that recent builds actually produced results.json — an empty run dir is
the fingerprint of a host problem masquerading as a recipe failure — and records
how to read a drone step log out of its sqlite when the API token is unreachable.
/recipe-upgrade --with-tests, /ci-test-review and /cc-ci-tests-update all author
test changes, and all three had only 'never weaken a test' as guidance. That did
not stop the plausible failure: the fixture INSERTed rows into the app's database,
which was correct for v2 and silently wrong for v3, where a site must belong to a
team. Events were acked 202 and discarded; the recipe sat RED for six weeks.
The rule that would have prevented it — set state up through the app's own
interface, not its database — now lives in tests/STYLE.md in the cc-ci repo, and
each of the three paths is told to read it before editing a test.
/cve-check answers 'what are we exposed to that an upgrade would fix?' without
running an upgrade: per-recipe, resolve the available window for EVERY image
(sidecars included), run the advisory scan over it, adjudicate whatever pass 1
could not decide, publish a report. Read-only — no PRs, no CI, no merges.
/cve-check-and-upgrade does that sweep, then runs /recipe-upgrade only on the
recipes whose upgrade actually closes a CVE, worst severity first, and reports
on both. --min-severity high for just the urgent ones; --dry-run prints the
queue and stops. Never merges.
Deliberate choices, each written into the skills:
- externals are SWEPT but never upgraded here — a security sweep that skipped
deployed software would misreport exposure, but we don't maintain them.
- an unknown count never justifies an upgrade AND is never treated as clean;
it goes to the Addendum.
- no upgrade available means 0 CVEs, not '?'.
- subagents are told which CVEs justify their upgrade, so the PR says why it
exists — a PR naming the RCE it closes gets reviewed sooner.
recipe-report.py grows a page kind: 'cve' files as cve-DATE.html so a sweep
can't overwrite a weekly edition, while BOTH appear in the same archive index,
suffixed 'full report' / 'CVE check'.
/help and /cc-ci-status updated to route to them.
Operator decision: no policy difference between cc-ci and recipe-maintainer. On
inspection ARM already agrees (recipe-upgrade-cron-all: 'PRs are reviewed and merged
manually by a human afterwards... never merges anything'; 'no human review in the
middle' = skip the mid-run plan confirmation only). Wrappers previously framed this
as a cc-ci override over ARM auto-merge flows — wrong reading; now stated as ONE
unified rule. /help conventions updated to match.
The repo already vendored ARM as the references/recipe-maintainer submodule (old
repo name recipe-maintainers/recipe-maintainer, pinned 460eba0). Rather than carry
two copies, drop the just-added vendor/ duplicate and:
- retarget references/recipe-maintainer to
ssh://git.autonomic.zone/recipe-maintainers/autonomic-recipe-maintainer.git
(same lineage — 460eba0 is an ancestor) and bump to latest acd5cfb, which also
refreshes the parity-test SOURCE reference the tests cite.
- gen-cctest-skills.py + all 30 cctest-* wrappers + /help now point at
references/recipe-maintainer.
- JOURNAL.md: pending session entries (server-update policy addendum, tests-update,
orchestrator-update, upgrade-run notes).
One operator interface for both toolkits (operator decision 2026-08-04):
- vendor/autonomic-recipe-maintainer: ARM pinned as a submodule at acd5cfb (latest).
- scripts/gen-cctest-skills.py: generates a cctest-<name> wrapper pair
(.opencode canonical + .claude thin) for every ARM skill — frontmatter carries ARM's
own description tagged [recipe-maintainer/cctest]; body points at the canonical
submodule SKILL.md, sets cwd/sandbox context, and states the policy overrides
(auto-merge-style ARM flows need per-run operator opt-in; never touch cc-ci infra
from an ARM skill; submodule is read-only here). Re-run after every submodule bump.
- 30 cctest-* wrappers generated.
- /help: cctest family section + situation-table rows + the cc-ci-vs-cctest rule of thumb.
cctest = the recipe-maintainer test server; these skills run against it + the ARM
sandbox, never against the cc-ci CI server/swarm.
Seven check areas: weekly-run recency+outcome, report publishing, stale recipes/tests,
open recipe PRs (CVE-carrying PRs open >14d flagged high-priority, ready-to-merge PRs
listed as normal), server+orchestrator flake-update recency vs channel tip, host/service
health incl. the bridge !testme path (silent-401 stale-secret check from the 2026-08-03
finding), and maintained-set consistency. Ends with ALL HEALTHY or a prioritized findings
list, each mapped to the skill to invoke. Strictly read-only.
Codifies the full path walked for the 2026-08-03 wordpress enrollment (cc-ci PR #14):
survey -> mirror create+sync from coopcloud -> author test suite (health floor +
non-vacuous recipe-specific tests incl. sec4.3 create-an-object round-trip, recipe-local
setup helper, PARITY.md) -> bridge POLL_REPOS -> used-recipes.md weekly row +
upstream/<recipe>.md registry -> full-suite-green verification with the new tests ->
bridge deploy via test-before-switch -> merge-on-green + report (PR-visibility policy).
Includes the traps hit live: creds injection over stdin for cc-ci-side helpers, fresh-
deploy wizard state in HEALTH_OK, repo-dev-shell ruff, swarm serialization, stale bridge
secret 401s silently dropping !testme.
- cc-ci-server-update / cc-ci-tests-update / cc-ci-update: operator policy change —
open PRs for visibility/historical record and merge directly once verified
(invocation = authorization); reports must list merged-PR links + change summaries.
(tests-update still never merges the paired recipe upgrade PRs.)
- cc-ci-server-update: mandatory nixos-rebuild test step (5d) before switch, with
detached-activation + transient-unit notes from the 2026-08-03 26.05 deploy.
- AGENTS.md: test-before-switch policy for orchestrator host rebuilds.
- NEW skill cc-ci-orchestrator-update (+ thin .claude wrapper): the /cc-ci-server-update
analogue for this host (flake /srv/cc-ci-orch, .#cc-ci-orchestrator-hetzner, Hetzner
server 134487234), with self-update caveats.
- JOURNAL.md: 2026-08-03 server-update incident/recovery handoff entry.
Reverse the skill location: the full definitions now live in
.opencode/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (opencode's native project-skill
location, auto-scanned), and .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md are thin
pointer wrappers that keep the frontmatter for discoverability and
redirect to the .opencode/ canonical file for the procedure.
Also drops the 'operator-authorized mid-run' gating from
/cc-ci-server-update: the operator's choice to invoke the skill IS the
authorization for the live nixos-rebuild switch — no second check to
wait for. The quiescent-moment preference stays (don't disrupt an
in-flight !testme), but it's not a gate.
autonomic-bot