I've been thinking of doing before, but haven't.
Now that the Whatsapp bridge does it (since 4797469383),
it makes sense to do it for all other bridges as well.
(Except for the IRC bridge - that one manages most of registration.yaml by itself)
We do use some `:latest` images by default for the following services:
- matrix-dimension
- Goofys (in the matrix-synapse role)
- matrix-bridge-appservice-irc
- matrix-bridge-appservice-discord
- matrix-bridge-mautrix-facebook
- matrix-bridge-mautrix-whatsapp
It's terribly unfortunate that those software projects don't release
anything other than `:latest`, but that's how it is for now.
Updating that software requires that users manually do `docker pull`
on the server. The playbook didn't force-repull images that it already
had.
With this patch, it starts doing so. Any image tagged `:latest` will be
force re-pulled by the playbook every time it's executed.
It should be noted that even though we ask the `docker_image` module to
force-pull, it only reports "changed" when it actually pulls something
new. This is nice, because it lets people know exactly when something
gets updated, as opposed to giving the indication that it's always
updating the images (even though it isn't).
We log to journald anyway. There's no need for double-logging.
It should not that matrix-synapse logs to journald and to files,
but that's likely to change in the future as well.
Because Synapse's logs are insanely verbose right now (and may get
dropped by journald), it's more reliable to have file-logging too.
As Synapse matures and gets more stable, logging should hopefully
get less, we should be able to only use journald and stop writing to
files for it as well.
Using a separate directory allows easier backups
(only need to back up the Ansible playbook configuration and the
bridge's `./data` directory).
The playbook takes care of migrating an existing database file
from the base directory into the `./data` directory.
In the future, we can also mount the configuration read-only,
to ensure the bridge won't touch it.
For now, mautrix-facebook is keen on rebuilding the `config.yaml`
file on startup though, so this will have to wait.
Related to #193, but for the Facebook bridge.
(other bridges can be changed to do the same later).
This patch makes the bridge configuration entirely managed by the
Ansible playbook. The bridge's `config.yaml` and `registration.yaml`
configuration files are regenerated every time the playbook runs.
This allows us to apply updates to those files and to avoid
people having to manage the configuration files manually on the server.
-------------------------------------------------------------
A deficiency of the current approach to dumping YAML configuration in
`config.yaml` is that we strip all comments from it.
Later on, when the bridge actually starts, it will load and redump
(this time with comments), which will make the `config.yaml` file
change.
Subsequent playbook runs will report "changed" for the
"Ensure mautrix-facebook config.yaml installed" task, which is a little
strange.
We might wish to improve this in the future, if possible.
Still, it's better to have a (usually) somewhat meaningless "changed"
task than to what we had -- never rebuilding the configuration.
Slavi Pantaleev
Marcel Partap