Stopping the stack kills an in-flight podcast job, but its status stays "running"
in the database forever: it never finishes, it blocks prune_podcast_data.py (which
deliberately refuses to run while a job is active), and it cannot even be retried —
/retry only accepts episodes in state "failed".
I walked into this myself: I ran `docker compose down` for the non-root switch
without checking for running jobs, and killed a podcast that had already produced
37 clips.
update_stack.sh now refuses to start when a podcast job is running, and says why.
Verified against a genuinely running job: it aborts before touching the stack.
BEDIENUNGSANLEITUNG documents how to recover an existing zombie. The status does not
live on the episode but on the linked `command` record (the episode's own job_status
is null), so the fix is to set that record to 'failed' via SurrealDB, after which the
normal retry works.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything the containers wrote into the bind mounts (surreal_data, notebook_data)
was owned by root, so the host user could not delete or back up his own podcast
data — prune_podcast_data.py and update_stack.sh had to detour through
`docker compose exec` for every rm and tar.
That was not a requirement, just the default: the open_notebook image declares no
USER, and the compose file even overrode surrealdb's own non-root user (65532)
with `user: root`, under the comment "Required for bind mounts on Linux" — which
is not true.
Both services now run as user: "1000:1000". Two things this needs:
- HOME=/tmp for open_notebook. Without it HOME resolves to "/" for a non-root uid,
uv cannot create /.cache/uv, and api + worker exit 2 at startup. Verified by
running the image as uid 1000 both ways.
- The data directories must be owned by that uid. Existing data was adopted with a
throwaway root container (chown -R), no sudo needed.
Both scripts drop the container detour and operate on the host directly, which is
simpler and now honest. smoke_test.sh gained two checks so a silent regression to
root cannot go unnoticed: the container's uid must match the host user, and no
foreign-owned files may exist under the data directories.
Verified: containers run as uid 1000, new files land as dschlueter and are
deletable without sudo, SurrealDB writes as 1000, a source can be created,
embedded and deleted through the API, and the full smoke test is green.
Note this deviates from what the image expects (it assumes root), so it is exactly
the kind of assumption an update can break — hence the smoke-test checks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Goal: at every session start, run exactly the application the repo says — and be able
to move to a new upstream release deliberately, with a way back.
The old setup (v1-latest + pull_policy: always) was unreliable in both directions.
`docker compose up -d` silently pulled a new application, including an irreversible
SurrealDB schema migration, while a reboot (restart: always) or `docker compose start`
kept running the old image without pulling anything. The running version was effectively
unpredictable.
Note v1-latest tracks releases, not main: the current image (v1.10.0, 2026-06-18) IS the
latest release — the repo being "ahead" is unreleased code, which is explicitly not
wanted here. So this is about guaranteeing and detecting, not catching up.
- docker-compose.yml: both images pinned by digest, pull_policy: missing.
- scripts/check_updates.sh: reports running version/digest vs the latest release and
registry digest. Changes nothing; meant for the session-start ritual.
- scripts/update_stack.sh: resolve new digest -> stop -> back up surreal_data,
notebook_data and docker-compose.yml -> repin -> start -> smoke test -> roll back data
AND compose file if the smoke test fails. The data backup is the point: the app migrates
the DB on startup and an older app cannot read a migrated DB, so a bad update would
otherwise be a one-way door. tar runs inside a container because the data dirs are
root-owned and the host user cannot restore over them.
- scripts/smoke_test.sh: checks what actually breaks here, not just "does it start".
Every local adaptation leans on upstream internals and can break silently: the
prompts/podcast directory mount masks the image's directory (a new template upstream
would be invisible), config/content_core.yaml freezes content-core's defaults (because
CCORE_CONFIG_PATH replaces rather than merges), and the env-var workarounds depend on
current content-core/esperanto/podcast_creator behaviour. So it verifies those
assumptions explicitly, plus API, TTS audio, STT and a real YouTube transcript.
Both scripts read the digest from the lfnovo/open_notebook line specifically. A naive
"first sha256 in the file" grep matches surrealdb (listed first) — caught while testing:
check_updates.sh falsely reported an update, and update_stack.sh would have rewritten the
database image instead of the application.
Verified: smoke test green against the current stack, and red (exit 1) when failures are
injected (dead TTS port, removed template variable). Backup/restore mechanics exercised
separately: 44 MB in 3.3s, restore yields 13 DB files and 91 notebook files. The update
path itself cannot be exercised end to end until a newer image exists.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
