The QA image is now built by Portainer from this repository rather than
by Gitea Actions. Deployed as a Git repository stack, "Pull and redeploy"
pulls the repo, builds from the Dockerfile, and recreates the containers
in one action.
This removes the runner from the loop entirely. Three dispatches failed
without ever building: the runner refuses privileged containers, so the
dind service was never created. Working around that needed either the
host Docker socket mounted into the runner or privileged containers
enabled runner-wide, and both hand every workflow on every branch
root-equivalent control of the NAS, production included. Portainer
already holds the socket — that is how it manages containers — so
building there needs no new privilege at all.
pull_policy: build is what keeps it honest. Without it the stack reuses
whatever is tagged redefined-designs:qa, which is exactly how a redeploy
appears to succeed while still serving old code — a failure this project
has already hit twice.
Deleting qa-build.yml also drops the registry, the REGISTRY_TOKEN and
BREVO_API_KEY secrets, and the notification email. The email existed
because CI worked asynchronously and had to tell you when it finished;
redeploying from Portainer is synchronous, so the browser already does.
Losing the per-commit image tags is a real cost — rollback becomes
"rebuild from the ref you want" rather than retagging a specific build.
README changes for this are deliberately not in this commit: that file
also carries uncommitted work of Thom's.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds a workflow_dispatch job that builds a chosen ref, pushes it to the
Gitea container registry as :qa plus a commit-sha tag, and emails when it
is ready. It deliberately does not restart the QA stack — redeploying
stays a human action in Portainer.
The build runs against a Docker-in-Docker service rather than the NAS's
Docker socket. Mounting the host socket into the runner would give every
workflow on every branch root-equivalent control of the NAS, production
included; pushing to a registry means the image does not need to survive
in the build daemon.
The QA stack now pulls that image instead of requiring a local build. The
previous arrangement meant the image existed only if someone remembered
to build it, which produced two confusing failures already: a Docker Hub
"pull access denied" when the tag was missing, and a silent stale-image
deploy when the build had not been rerun.
Two runner capabilities cannot be verified from here — privileged service
containers for dind, and a docker CLI in the runner image. The workflow
checks both and fails with an explanation rather than a connection
refused, and validates all five required secrets and variables up front
rather than part-way through a build.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Deploying the stack first failed with "pull access denied for
redefined-designs, repository does not exist or may require docker
login". The README had the Portainer stack creation ahead of the build,
so no local redefined-designs:qa image existed and Compose fell back to
pulling from Docker Hub, where the repository does not exist.
The build step now comes first in the one-time setup, and the review
workflow says to rebuild before restarting the stack — the stack builds
nothing itself and would otherwise run whatever was last tagged :qa.
pull_policy: never makes the failure legible: a missing local image now
reports itself as missing rather than as a registry authentication
problem. Noted as safe to remove if the NAS's Compose ever rejects the
key, since it only affects the error message.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A disposable stack for reviewing merged-but-undeployed changes online,
running alongside production on the same NAS.
Every value that could collide with production is changed: container
names, host port (32751), volume paths, database name, and image tag.
The Postgres data directory is the critical one — sharing production's
would mean QA writing into production's database files.
QA deliberately differs from production in three ways. DEMO_MODE=true
with no PayPal credentials, so the full cart and checkout path is
exercisable with no route to live PayPal. No SMTP configuration, so a QA
run cannot email anyone; the mailer already degrades gracefully when
unset. And restart: "no", so a NAS reboot does not quietly bring QA back
up and leave it running.
The stack must be named redefined-designs-qa in Portainer: the stack name
becomes the compose project name, and reusing production's would make
compose reconcile the two against each other and remove the production
containers.
README covers the one-time NAS directory setup, the review workflow, and
how to reset QA data.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
bermudalambandClaude Opus 5