mrambossekandClaude Fable 5 3cdbccee18 cli: serving is an explicit verb; no arguments prints usage ...

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>

2026-08-01 17:42:20 +02:00

..

echolot-server

cli: serving is an explicit verb; no arguments prints usage

2026-08-01 17:42:20 +02:00