Queue-North-Website/docs/OPERATIONS.md

# Operations — Queue North Website

```
Status: Current
Owner: _null
Last reviewed: 2026-08-18
Governs: Dockerfile, docker-compose.yml, scripts/status.sh,
         scripts/healthcheck.sh, scripts/backup.sh, scripts/restore-check.sh —
         what watches this in production, and what to do when it stops
Review trigger: A new alert or a new place errors are sent; a change to the
                backup schedule or the restore procedure; any change to the
                deploy host, container or image; any incident whose first ten
                minutes were spent working out what to run
```

## Why this exists

Every other document here describes what the project *is*. This one describes
what happens when it stops being that at three in the morning, and it is the
only document written for somebody who is not thinking clearly.

The failure it prevents is specific: **the first ten minutes of an incident
spent working out which host, which container, and which command**, while the
thing everybody actually wants to know — is it down, or is it just unreachable
from here — goes unanswered.

## What is deployed, and where

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Public origin | `https://qn.isnull.dev`, fronted by Cloudflare |
| Host | **nebula** (`192.168.1.11`) — the same box as the Forgejo instance |
| Container | `qn-website-dev` |
| Image | `dream.scheller.ltd/null/queue-north-website:dev` |
| Port | 3001 in the container; the reverse proxy in front owns the public one |
| Database | `/app/db/queuenorth.db`, in the named volume `qn-website-dev_queuenorth-db` |
| Logs volume | `qn-website-dev_queuenorth-logs` → `/app/logs` |
| Runs as | UID 1001, non-root |

`queuenorth.com` also resolves and returns 200. **It is not this deployment** —
it is the customer's own domain and is not served by this container. Do not
diagnose against it.

## Where errors go

**Nowhere. This project has no error tracking.**

Said in one line rather than left blank, because a gap somebody chose is a
different thing from a gap nobody noticed. There is no Sentry project, no DSN and
no alert destination. An unhandled exception is logged to the container's stdout
and takes the process down: `server/index.js` handles `uncaughtException` and
`unhandledRejection` by logging and exiting 1, and Docker's `restart:
unless-stopped` brings it back. **That means a crash loop looks like a running
service to anything that only reads a state.** `scripts/status.sh` reports the
restart count for exactly this reason.

**A liveness tick is not error tracking.** `scripts/healthcheck.sh` answers *is
it up*. Nothing here answers *is it working* — a server returning 500 to every
form submission is up, healthy, and losing every lead.

## What alerts, and to whom

| Signal | Where it goes | Who acts on it |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Container `HEALTHCHECK` fails 3× at 30 s | Docker marks the container unhealthy on nebula | **Nobody, automatically.** It is visible to anyone who looks and notifies no one |
| `scripts/healthcheck.sh` | whoever runs it | not scheduled |
| Everything else | — | — |

**This table is nearly empty and that is the honest state.** Nothing on this
project pages anybody. The site could be down for a day and the first report
would come from the customer.

Two things would change that and neither is filed as work yet: scheduling
`healthcheck.sh` somewhere that can shout, and giving the process somewhere to
send an exception. Recorded here rather than invented into the tracker.

## Backups

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Schedule | **None yet.** `scripts/backup.sh` works and nothing runs it on a timer |
| What is captured | `/app/db/queuenorth.db` — the `leads` and `support_requests` tables. Deliberately not captured: the logs volume, and the environment, which holds the secrets |
| Where it lands | `$HOME/backups/queue-north-website` on the operator's machine, mode 700. **Still one machine** — see below |
| Retention | `BACKUP_KEEP`, default 7 |
| **Last verified restore** | **2026-08-18, by `_null` — 2 tables, 3 rows, restored in under 1 s** |

`scripts/backup.sh` proves a dump is readable before trusting it — it runs
better-sqlite3's online `.backup()` inside the container, copies the result out,
and refuses the run unless `PRAGMA integrity_check` returns `ok` and the table
count is plausible, only then renaming it into place. `scripts/restore-check.sh`
proves it can be restored, which is a different claim: a file that parses is not
a database you can get back.

**A backup nobody has restored is a guess.** The date above is the only line in
this table that says otherwise, and as of 2026-08-18 it says something: a
snapshot was taken from the running container, replayed into a scratch database
from SQL, and counted. It came back.

**Two things that are still true anyway**, and both are tracked in `Batch 15`:

1. **Nothing runs on a schedule.** One backup taken by hand is not a backup
   regime. Until a timer exists, the newest dump is as old as the last time
   somebody remembered.
2. **The dump lives on one machine, beside nothing.** `backup.sh` says this
   itself on every run: *a backup that only exists beside the database it came
   from does not survive the disk, the host or the account.* It is currently on
   the operator's workstation and nowhere else.

The exposure is worth stating plainly: `/app/db/queuenorth.db` is the only live
copy of every lead and support request the site has ever taken, it lives in one
Docker volume on one host, and it took writes today.

**A number worth knowing before you need it:** the restore took under a second,
because the database is 28 KB and holds three leads. That will stay true for a
long time at this volume — this is a contact form, not a transactional system —
so during an incident, restoring is cheap and there is no reason to hesitate over
it.

`RESTORE_MIN_ROWS` is currently 0, which means the check cannot yet catch the
snapshot-of-an-empty-volume case. Set it to something below the real lead count
once that count is meaningful, and it starts catching the one failure a
structural check never can.

## Rate limits and cost ceilings

*(precautionary — no incident here has yet come from this.)*

| Endpoint or job | What it costs per call | What bounds it |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `POST /api/leads` | one SQLite insert, one reCAPTCHA verify, one Zoho form post | `RATE_LIMIT_PER_MINUTE`, default 5, per IP across all of `/api`. Body capped at 1 MB, request at 30 s |
| `POST /api/support` | the same, plus a Zoho Case when enabled | same limiter |
| Google reCAPTCHA | free at this volume | the same limiter, upstream of it |
| Zoho CRM | free at this volume; the API path has per-org daily credits | fire-and-forget, so exhausting them degrades CRM sync and never the site |

**Where does the spend alert go, and at what number?** Nowhere, and there is no
number. Nothing here bills per call at this volume, which is why that is
tolerable rather than an oversight — but if an LLM, a mail sender or a paid API
is ever added, this table is the first thing that has to change.

## It is down — what now

In this order. Each step is a command that answers one question, and none of them
change anything.

1. **Is it actually down, or unreachable from here?**
   `bash scripts/healthcheck.sh` from anywhere, then
   `bash scripts/status.sh`. The second distinguishes those two and reports the
   restart count. **A climbing restart count with a short uptime is a crash loop**,
   not a healthy service, and reads as "running" in every tool that shows only a
   state.
2. **What is it saying?** `bash scripts/status.sh --logs 200`.
3. **Is the deployed version the one you think?** `bash scripts/status.sh`
   prints the image digest. **`--deployed-version` cannot answer here** — the
   image carries no `org.opencontainers.image.version` label, so the script
   correctly reports the version as unknown rather than guessing. Compare the
   **digest** against the registry instead:

   ```bash
   bash scripts/status.sh | grep digest
   ```

   Adding that label at build time would make this step a one-liner and is worth
   doing next time the Dockerfile is touched.
4. **Is it the database?** `/api/health` returns 503 with `db: error` when the
   `SELECT 1` fails. That is a real answer and not an outage of the whole site:
   the marketing pages keep serving while every form submission is failing.
5. **Did something change recently?** The tracker and `git log` — a deploy, a
   config edit, a Cloudflare rule.
6. **Is it Cloudflare rather than us?** Compare a request to the origin on nebula
   against one to `qn.isnull.dev`. Cloudflare fronts everything here, including
   the Forgejo instance on the same host.

### Rolling forward or back

**This is the gap in this runbook and it is named rather than papered over.**

Publishing is `npm run docker:push`, which builds and pushes
`queue-north-website:dev` to the Forgejo registry. How nebula then *moves* to the
new image — a compose file on the host, a Portainer stack, a watchtower, a manual
`docker pull && docker compose up -d` — is not written down anywhere in this
repository, and was not recoverable from it on 2026-08-18.

Until somebody writes it here, a rollback is: find the previous image digest in
the registry, and do on nebula whatever it is that normally happens. That is not
a procedure. The template's `deploy.py` was deliberately **not** adopted for this
reason — a deploy script pointed at a path nobody has confirmed is worse than no
deploy script.

**Write the incident down afterwards**, in `docs/history/DEVELOPMENT_LOG.md` with
the date, and file what broke as an issue with a severity label. An incident
nobody recorded happens again with the same surprise.