soleprint/rig/BOOTSTRAP.md

From a machine with nothing on it to a project you can work in

The README says the prerequisite is Docker and nothing else. This is what that actually looks like end to end: a bare Linux box, and a new project running under Tilt at the end of it.

A copy of this directory is a sibling of it, named after the environment it models (acme-rig). Paths below are relative to the parent checkout.

It spans three repos because the work does. rig prepares the machine — the pinned toolchain, the cluster, the port arithmetic. all owns the shape a project takes, in all/projects/templates/conventions.md and the broad scaffold beside it. ppl owns everything after local, and is where this document stops.

Read it once before running anything. Three of the steps below need root and one needs a logout, so knowing about them in advance is cheaper than meeting them halfway through.

Docker, and the two sysctls Tilt depends on

rig installs a toolchain; it does not install Docker. That line is not modesty — Docker is a daemon, a group membership and usually a logout, and a script that did it would have to be trusted with root on a machine it knows nothing about.

sudo apt-get install -y docker.io && sudo usermod -aG docker "$USER"

Then log out and back in, and check docker info answers. Until it does, nothing below works and everything below reports the same failure.

While you have root, raise the inotify limits:

echo -e 'fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288\nfs.inotify.max_user_instances=512' \
  | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-rig.conf
sudo sysctl --system

kind and Tilt both watch large trees, and WSL ships 8192 watches and 128 instances — far too low. The failure mode is the reason this is here at step zero rather than mentioned later: Tilt does not error, it simply stops noticing that files changed, and you lose an afternoon to a hot reload that silently isn't.

Read the docs before installing anything

cd rig
make docs

ctrl/docs.sh runs a throwaway nginx:alpine over a read-only bind mount of docs/ and prints the URL. That is deliberate: the docs are the instructions for building everything else, so they cannot live in the cluster and cannot need python3 -m http.server either — a minimal Debian has no python. What it has, by definition, is Docker.

The port is this environment's HTTP_PORT + 4. Nothing is installed and nothing persists; ctrl-c ends it.

Ask what is wrong with this machine

make check
cp ctrl/.env.example ctrl/.env

check.sh reports and instructs, and fixes nothing. It runs bare rather than in a container because host detection only ever reads /proc and /etc — no dependency beyond coreutils.

Read the whole output, but the ports block is the one to read carefully. Every port rig binds derives from this directory's name, so the answer is specific to this copy, and a clash here surfaces as an opaque failed to bind host port in the middle of cluster creation if you skip it.

Copy the .env even though the check only warns about it. It is gitignored, it is where a machine-local override goes, and ports.sh persist expects it to exist.

Install the toolchain — through the container

This is the step where "nothing installed" stops being rhetorical.

make deps runs ctrl/deps.sh install directly on the host, and the installer fetches with curl. A stock debian:trixie-slim has no curl — detection runs fine, then the first download dies with curl: command not found and an exit code of 127. That is the bootstrap paradox ctrl/Dockerfile.deps exists to kill — the installer carries its own toolchain so the host needs only Docker — but building the image and running it are two different things, and only the build has a Makefile target today. On a genuinely bare machine, run it by hand:

make deps-image                          # builds rig-deps:deps
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
docker run --rm \
  -v /:/host:ro \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -v "$HOME/.local/bin:/out/bin" \
  -e HOST_UID="$(id -u)" -e HOST_GID="$(id -g)" \
  rig-deps:deps install dev

The image name follows the directory, like everything else here: in rig it is rig-deps, in a copy called acme-rig it is acme-rig-deps. The tag is deps (or full, below), not latest.

None of the four arguments are guessable, so:

• /:/host:ro — the installer reads the host's /etc/os-release and /etc/wsl.conf, not the container's. HOST_ROOT=/host is already baked into the image; this is what it points at. Read-only, and it is the only reason detection inside a container tells you anything about the machine.
• the docker socket — how detection reaches the daemon it is reporting on, and how it counts kind clusters already running.
• /out/bin — the image's OUT_BIN. Whatever you mount here is where the four binaries land.
• HOST_UID / HOST_GID — the installer runs as root so it can reach that socket, which means everything it writes into a mounted volume is root-owned and useless to you. These drive the chown back. Omit them and the install looks like it worked.

dev is kubectl, jq, kind and tilt. core is kubectl and jq alone — no cluster tooling — which is the right answer on a managed or corporate-issued machine and is why the split exists.

Then put them on PATH, which the installer will remind you about because it cannot edit your shell for you:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"     # and add the same line to ~/.bashrc

If something else on this machine already provides kubectl, the installer says so by name rather than shadowing it quietly. OUT_BIN=$PWD/def/bin installs somewhere private instead.

Two variants worth knowing before you need them. make deps-image full bakes every pinned binary into the image at build time (DEPS_SOURCE=baked), so docker save gives you the entire installer as one file to carry into an air-gapped network. And DEPS_SOURCE=artifactory with DEPS_ARTIFACTORY_URL pulls from a generic internal repo, which is usually the only thing a locked-down client allows.

From here on this machine has curl, so make deps is the short form for every later run and every later copy of this directory. The container path is the first-time path.

Prove the machine before blaming the project

make setup
make cluster up
kubectl get nodes

make setup re-runs every check as a group. It is idempotent and it deliberately does not abort on the first failure — a setup script that dies at step two hides the fact that steps four and five were also going to fail. Run now, it should be ok and done all the way down, and that is the point: it is the scoreboard, not the installer.

make cluster up builds the default minimal profile — one node, no addons, boots fast. You do not need it to develop anything, but you do want to know that kind, the kubeconfig context and the derived port block work before a new project has any problems of its own to confuse them with. make cluster down when you are done looking.

Before starting a second cluster, and it will not be long:

make cluster list

Available memory, per-cluster usage and each cluster's port block. On a 16 GiB box four single-node clusters are comfortable and six push into swap, so this is worth reading before rather than after. make cluster free <names> stops clusters without deleting them; docker start brings them back untouched.

Scaffold the project

The canonical layout is all/projects/templates/conventions.md. Read it — it is short, opinionated, and exists precisely so nobody reverse-engineers a layout from whichever repo they happened to open. What follows is only the mechanical part.

SLUG=<slug>                                    # short, lowercase, no separators
cp -r ~/wdir/semester/all/projects/templates/broad ~/wdir/semester/"$SLUG"
cd ~/wdir/semester/"$SLUG"
grep -rl '<slug>' ctrl | xargs sed -i "s/<slug>/$SLUG/g"
cp ctrl/k8s/.env.example ctrl/k8s/.env
git init && git add -A && git commit -m "scaffold $SLUG from broad"

<slug> is the only placeholder and it lives only under ctrl/ — cluster name, namespace, ConfigMap name, and the NAME= in kind-up.sh / kind-down.sh. One sed does all of it.

The slug is the folder name, lowercase and short — mpr, unt, nvi. The cluster takes that name and the context becomes kind-<slug>, derived by the scaffold's Makefile from the directory, so there is nothing to edit for either.

Pick the Tilt port deliberately. ctrl/k8s/.env.example ships a value that is already in use, so copying it unchanged puts two projects on one port:

grep -h '^TILT_PORT=' ~/wdir/semester/*/ctrl/k8s/.env 2>/dev/null | sort

Choose a free one in 10300–10399 — the range ALL reserves in projects/index.json under policy — avoiding 10350, which is Tilt's own default. Currently taken: nvi 10330, unt 10340, mpr 10360, mlv 10370, eth 10380, lng 10390. This is the Tilt web UI port, not a service port; each project owns its own service ports separately. The scaffold ships it blank on purpose, so there is nothing to collide with until you choose.

The scaffold's ctrl/k8s/ is the same shape as every other project here, and it builds as shipped:

kind-config.yaml       one node; gateway NodePort 30080 -> hostPort 8080
base/                  namespace, configmap, app (Deployment + Service)
overlays/dev/          promotes the app Service to NodePort 30080

Check it before kind spends minutes on anything — this renders the whole tree without a cluster and catches a broken patch immediately:

kubectl kustomize ctrl/k8s/overlays/dev

The workload is an nginx placeholder so a fresh copy reaches something that answers; replace it. Keep 30080 in step between the overlay patch and kind-config.yaml's containerPort — the hostPort is this project's to pick. Reachability is a plain kind port mapping: no ingress controller and no MetalLB. Caddy maps <slug>.local.ar onto the host port (~/wdir/semester/ppl/local/Caddyfile), with *.local.ar resolving to 127.0.0.1 through dnsmasq. That is the whole chain.

The one file the scaffold still does not ship is ctrl/Tiltfile — make tilt-up runs cd ctrl && tilt up, and there is nothing to run until you write one. Copy it from a live project; unt and nvi are closest to the plain shape.

Run it

make kind-up      # idempotent create, then selects the context
make tilt-up      # context + your assigned port

tilt-up passes --context kind-<slug> every time, which is the point of going through make at all: tilt cannot deploy into whichever cluster you last looked at.

make tilt-down and make kind-down close the loop, and make kind-reset is delete-and-recreate for when a cluster wedges.

Register it

The project exists; now it is findable. Add an entry to ~/wdir/semester/all/projects/index.json and write its projects/<slug>.md beside the others. Structured fields in the index, prose in the markdown.

Putting it on the CI server and deploying it is ppl's half, and it starts at ~/wdir/semester/ppl/ctrl/init-repo.sh — gitea remote, then Woodpecker. That is a different document.