waving-hands/deploy

Deploying Waving Hands

Every game is a room on a small Node process that keeps it as an append-only ledger of moves in /var/lib/waving-hands/rooms (the unit names it with WH_DATA_DIR). Production is the shared Kestrel's Hall host: Caddy terminates TLS with automatic certificates, serves the static build from /opt/waving-hands/build, and proxies /api and /ws to the game server on port 8788, which runs as the waving-hands user under systemd from /opt/waving-hands/app.

The shared host

The games of Kestrel's Hall share one droplet, hall (nyc3, s-1vcpu-1gb, $6 a month, tag kestrels-hall, IP 159.203.115.252). Each game keeps its own Caddy site file in /etc/caddy/sites/.caddy, its own port, service user, /opt/ and /var/lib/ trees, access log (/var/lib/caddy/-access.log), cron file and ops scripts; /etc/caddy/Caddyfile only says import sites/*.caddy. A game server is one small Node process capped at 300 MB by its unit file, and a room is a few kilobytes of ledger, so the host carries several. Each game needs a port of its own on the host: wizwar 8787, waving-hands 8788, hnefatafl 8789, dip 8790.

Current production

• Host: 159.203.115.252
• URLs: https://hands.kestrelsnest.social (A record at Hover, where kestrelsnest.social's DNS lives) and https://hands.159.203.115.252.sslip.io (always works, zero DNS).
• Everyday deploy: SITE=https://hands.159.203.115.252.sslip.io deploy/deploy.sh 159.203.115.252 (this Mac's resolver caches the old *.kestrelsnest.social wildcard, so the gate reads the sslip name).
• Moved here from its own droplet (159.203.98.71) on 2026-09-25.
• Players' reports: deploy/pull-reports.sh mirrors /var/lib/waving-hands/feedback.jsonl and the screenshots to ~/Desktop/waving-hands-reports with a digest; deploy/report-reply.sh 159.203.115.252 <id> <status> "text" answers one.

Adding this game to the host

1. scp deploy/setup-droplet.sh deploy/Caddyfile.tmpl root@<ip>:/root/ && ssh root@<ip> \ "bash /root/setup-droplet.sh 'hands.kestrelsnest.social, hands.<ip>.sslip.io'" It installs Caddy and Node if the host lacks them, writes this game's site file, and touches nothing of another game's. Point the A record at the host first, or leave the real name out until it is; running it again with the new line is how a name is added later.
2. deploy/deploy.sh <ip>

A fresh host, when one is needed: doctl compute droplet create hall --region nyc3 \ --size s-1vcpu-1gb --image ubuntu-24-04-x64 --ssh-keys <your-key-ids> \ --tag-name kestrels-hall --wait, then step 1.

Operations scripts on the droplet

deploy.sh installs these to /usr/local/bin and the cron file to /etc/cron.d/waving-hands on every deploy, so the live copies are the repo copies:

• waving-hands-visitors.sh [day]: who is here now and who came that day.
• waving-hands-pulse.sh: the weekly health check (service, errors, rollup trend, backup, box).
• waving-hands-rollup.sh [day]: one JSON line per day of counts, run nightly at 00:12 UTC into /var/lib/waving-hands/rollup.jsonl.
• waving-hands-backup.sh: nightly at 07:23 UTC, mirrors /var/lib/waving-hands to the kestrel-wizwar-backups Space under waving-hands/ (a current copy and dated snapshots kept 90 days). It needs rclone with the Spaces credentials in /root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf, copied by hand from the wizwar droplet; until then it logs "skipped".

Errors from the duel server go to Sentry, project waving-hands in the locallygrownnet organisation; the DSN is in the unit file. The nightly rollup and backup check in with Sentry Crons when /root/.waving-hands-sentry-cron-rollup and /root/.waving-hands-sentry-cron hold their check-in URLs (the ingest URL with the project's cron path and public key), so a missed night is noticed.

To have every new issue, regression and reappearance posted to Slack the way wizwar's are, run deploy/sentry-slack-alert.sh [#channel] once from your own shell with SENTRY_TOKEN (an org auth token with alerts:write) and SLACK_CHANNEL_ID set; the token never leaves the shell.

Before every deploy, deploy/verify-ledgers.sh <ip> fetches every production ledger and replays it with the local engine, comparing each room with what the server shows. A ledger the new engine refuses or replays differently stops the deploy: the server would rewrite that duel on restart.

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
• Who has been playing: ssh root@<ip> waving-hands-visitors.sh [YYYY-MM-DD] prints today's visitors from Caddy's log (people and bots apart, by page), every room opened today with how far it got, and the names seated, marking those seen for the first time.
• 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.