The admin version stamp has reported commit "unknown" everywhere. #233 read it out of .git during the build and #235 removed that, because Portainer's build context has no repository history and the COPY failed every deploy — the version stamp became the thing that stopped deployments. #237 then established that building in Gitea Actions does not help: the Dockerfile no longer copies .git, so where the build runs is irrelevant.
So the builder hands the commit over rather than the build going to look for it. ARG GIT_COMMIT, empty by default, passed through to writeBuildInfo, which prefers it and still falls back to reading .git so a local build stamps itself with no argument needed.
An empty value is treated as absent rather than stamped. `--build-arg GIT_COMMIT=` is what an unset shell variable expands to, and a blank commit reads as one that happens to be empty rather than one nobody supplied.
Nothing regresses for Portainer. It cannot pass the argument, so its images keep saying "unknown" exactly as today, and they still deploy — the property #235 was bought with.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
There was no way to tell which build an environment was running. That is not hypothetical: minutes after #232 merged, `npm run backfill:images` in QA failed with `tsx: not found` because the container was still serving the pre-merge image, and the only thing that revealed it was npm echoing the old script line. Had the change been anywhere other than a package.json script, the container would have looked healthy while running the wrong code.
The header now reads something like `a5076cc · built 29 Aug 20:36`. The commit answers "is this the code I expect"; the build time answers "did my redeploy actually rebuild", which is a different question and the one that would have caught the case above.
The commit is read out of `.git` directly rather than by shelling out, because node:20-bookworm-slim has no git binary and adding an apt layer so the image can print seven characters is a poor trade. `.git` is copied into the build stage only — verified absent from the final image — so no repository history reaches a deployed container.
Resolution is pure and separately tested across every shape that actually occurs: a detached HEAD holding the object name, which is what a checkout of a ref produces; a symbolic HEAD followed to a loose ref file; the same followed to packed-refs, which is what a fresh clone commonly has; peeled `^` tag lines ignored so an annotated tag cannot yield the wrong commit; and every failure path returning `unknown`. That last part is the one that matters most — this runs during a Docker build, and a version stamp must never be the thing that stops a deploy.
Served from a gated /api/admin/version rather than folded into /api/config. That endpoint is public, and a commit hash there would tell any storefront visitor exactly which revision of a public repository is deployed. An integration test asserts the gate and asserts the public config does not carry it, because the boundary is the whole point rather than an implementation detail.
Verified in the built image rather than argued: the stamp inside it reads a5076cc, matching `git rev-parse --short HEAD`, and a running container serves it from /api/admin/version while /api/config returns only what it did before.
Backend: 296 unit, 263 integration, tsc clean, lint unchanged at six pre-existing warnings. Frontend builds clean with its two pre-existing warnings untouched.
Closes#233