When replacing a container currently we:
1. Boot the new container
2. Wait for it to become healthy
3. Stop the old container
Traefik will send requests to the old container until it notices that it
is unhealthy. But it may have stopped serving requests before that point
which can result in errors.
To get round that the new boot process is:
1. Create a directory with a single file on the host
2. Boot the new container, mounting the cord file into /tmp and
including a check for the file in the docker healthcheck
3. Wait for it to become healthy
4. Delete the healthcheck file ("cut the cord") for the old container
5. Wait for it to become unhealthy and give Traefik a couple of seconds
to notice
6. Stop the old container
The extra steps ensure that Traefik stops sending requests before the
old container is shutdown.
Setting env variables in the docker arguments requires having them on
the deploy host.
Instead we'll add two new commands `kamal env push` and
`kamal env delete` which will manage copying the environment as .env
files to the remote host.
Docker will pick up the file with `--env-file <path-to-file>`. Env files
will be stored under `<kamal run directory>/env`.
Running `kamal env push` will create env files for each role and
accessory, and traefik if required.
`kamal envify` has been updated to also push the env files.
By avoiding using `kamal envify` and creating the local and remote
secrets manually, you can now avoid accessing secrets needed
for the docker runtime environment locally. You will still need build
secrets.
One thing to note - the Docker doesn't parse the environment variables
in the env file, one result of this is that you can't specify multi-line
values - see https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/12997.
We maybe need to look docker config or docker secrets longer term to get
around this.
Hattip to @kevinmcconnell - this was all his idea.
Replaces our current host-based HTTP healthchecks with Docker
healthchecks, and adds a new `healthcheck.cmd` config option that can be
used to define a custom health check command. Also removes Traefik's
healthchecks, since they are no longer necessary.
When deploying a container that has a healthcheck defined, we wait for
it to report a healthy status before stopping the old container that it
replaces. Containers that don't have a healthcheck defined continue to
wait for `MRSK.config.readiness_delay`.
There are some pros and cons to using Docker healthchecks rather than
checking from the host. The main advantages are:
- Supports non-HTTP checks, and app-specific check scripts provided by a
container.
- When booting a container, allows MRSK to wait for a container to be
healthy before shutting down the old container it replaces. This
should be safer than relying on a timeout.
- Containers with healthchecks won't be active in Traefik until they
reach a healthy state, which prevents any traffic from being routed to
them before they are ready.
The main _disadvantage_ is that containers are now required to provide
some way to check their health. Our default check assumes that `curl` is
available in the container which, while common, won't always be the
case.
When deploying check if there is already a container with the existing
name. If there is rename it to "<version>_<random_hex_string>" to remove
the name clash with the new container we want to boot.
We can then do the normal zero downtime run/wait/stop.
While implementing this I discovered the --filter name=foo does a
substring match for foo, so I've updated those filters to do an exact
match instead.
