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Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5.1 6c6edca4be The hall comes first, in the shape of wizwar's landing

The home page is a centred card: title and pitch, your name, play the
bot or continue the duel under way, create or join a duel by code, a
sample ledger, the duels this browser holds with whose move it is, and
the story of the game. The single-player board lives at /play. The
droplet gains the duel server as a systemd service behind Caddy.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-09-22 17:11:45 -04:00

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Deploying Waving Hands

The single-player game runs entirely in the browser. Duels between people go through a small Node process that keeps each room as an append-only ledger of moves in /var/lib/waving-hands/rooms. Production is one DigitalOcean droplet: Caddy terminates TLS with automatic certificates, serves the static build from /opt/waving-hands/build, and proxies /api and /ws to the duel server on port 8788, which runs as the waving-hands user under systemd from /opt/waving-hands/app.

Sizing

The smallest droplet, s-1vcpu-512mb-10gb ($4 a month), carries both Caddy and the duel server comfortably: the server is one small Node process capped at 300 MB by its unit file, and a room is a few kilobytes of ledger.

The zero-cost alternative is a second site block in an existing Caddy server's configuration pointing at a second directory; the deploy script works unchanged against that host. A droplet of its own keeps this site's uptime and upgrades independent of anything else.

Current production

Droplet: waving-hands (nyc3, s-1vcpu-512mb-10gb, tag waving-hands), IP 159.203.98.71
URLs: https://hands.kestrelsnest.social (A record at Hover, where kestrelsnest.social's DNS lives) and https://waving-hands.159.203.98.71.sslip.io (always works, zero DNS). Caddy serves both from the first line of /etc/caddy/Caddyfile.
Everyday deploy: deploy/deploy.sh 159.203.98.71

New droplet from scratch

doctl compute droplet create waving-hands --region nyc3 \ --size s-1vcpu-512mb-10gb --image ubuntu-24-04-x64 \ --ssh-keys <your-key-ids> --tag-name waving-hands --wait
scp deploy/setup-droplet.sh root@<ip>:/root/ && ssh root@<ip> \ "bash /root/setup-droplet.sh 'hands.kestrelsnest.social, waving-hands.<ip>.sslip.io'" (point the A record at the new IP first, or leave the real name out until it is).
scp deploy/setup-server.sh root@<ip>:/root/ && ssh root@<ip> "bash /root/setup-server.sh"
deploy/deploy.sh <ip>

The sslip.io hostname works with no DNS at all. To add a real name, point an A record at the droplet and add the name to the first line of /etc/caddy/Caddyfile (space separated), then systemctl reload caddy; Caddy fetches the certificate on first request.

Everyday deploys

deploy/deploy.sh <ip>

Runs the type-checks, the tests and the build locally, rsyncs build/ to the droplet keeping the previous week's hashed assets, rsyncs the server and engine sources, installs dependencies, and restarts the duel server. A single-player game is in the player's own browser and loses nothing. A room is replayed from its ledger when the server comes back, which takes a few seconds; Caddy holds requests that land in the gap.

Operations

Logs: ssh root@<ip> journalctl -u waving-hands -f for the duel server, journalctl -u caddy -f and /var/lib/caddy/access.log for the web side.
Restart: ssh root@<ip> systemctl restart waving-hands
Rooms: /var/lib/waving-hands/rooms/<CODE>.jsonl, one ledger per duel. Copy that directory to back them up; single-player games are in players' browsers.

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