cli: serving is an explicit verb; no arguments prints usage
server-release / image (push) Successful in 15s
server-test / test (push) Successful in 33s
server-release / release (push) Successful in 34s

Running an unfamiliar binary by name should tell you what it does, not bind a
dozen ports and start answering the internet. --serve (or --daemon) now does
that, and a bare invocation prints usage and exits 2 - non-zero on purpose, so a
service manager sees a failure rather than concluding the server ran and
finished cleanly.

The hazard this creates is worth spelling out, because it bites once and
silently: three places started the binary with no arguments - the systemd unit,
the unit template, and the Dockerfile - and --self-update replaces the binary
but never the unit. A routine update would therefore leave a service that cannot
start, discovered whenever the host next rebooted.

So the updater repairs it: after replacing the binary it appends --serve to an
ExecStart that has no flags, but only in a unit this program wrote (identified
by its description). Editing an operator's hand-written unit would be overreach;
leaving ours broken would be negligence.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
mrambossek
2026-08-01 17:42:20 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Fable 5
parent 80d2092f1b
commit 3cdbccee18
5 changed files with 99 additions and 2 deletions
+3
View File
@@ -22,4 +22,7 @@ VOLUME ["/state"]
# the data plane must see real client source addresses/TTLs, and Docker's
# userland NAT would falsify exactly what this server exists to observe.
EXPOSE 8441/tcp 8442/udp 8443/tcp
# The verb is explicit here too, so `docker run <image>` serves and `docker run <image> --help`
# still works by overriding the command.
ENTRYPOINT ["/echolot-server"]
CMD ["--serve"]