Piik/docs/deployment.md

Minimal Deployment

Last verified against upstream documentation: 2026-08-24.

This page records exact release 8f5b3f1 production facts and the deployment contract for exact Browser v9 source d543f38aacad3df5ef65fde1055cc8e733972afe. V9 is implemented in source but is not yet deployed. Product direction and pending work are owned by project memory and the TODO ledger.

This section documents the repository's UDP-only deployment candidate: one Node.js process provides the built Web client, room API, and WebSocket signaling behind Caddy or nginx; application ICE advertises only STUN by default; LiveKit supplies bounded SFU fallback capacity. Normal media remains distributed through direct or peer edges whenever those paths work.

A deployment may additionally provide one dedicated single-node LiveKit process as the current controller's automatic final media fallback. This capacity is dormant unless the complete public URL, private API URL, key, secret, and capacity tuple is configured. It does not replace the P2P path, the peer-assisted experiment, or required STUN discovery. LiveKit remains ICE/UDP only. Ordinary peer ICE remains STUN-only and production coturn uses the tracked STUN-only configuration with TCP/TLS disabled. The source and production configure no TURN, ICE/TCP, media TCP, or TLS-relayed media.

Production runs exact 8f5b3f192ddd010ca01c969008e512191312736a, release 8f5b3f1, from /opt/screener/releases/8f5b3f1. The immutable runtime archive SHA-256 is 09c18d3604b64b627b01164b5a8d954fcbaeb567ca12dedf0b89deaac72bd767. Its verified rollback boundary is /opt/screener/backups/8f5b3f1-precutover-20260823T182438Z. Local and public health return 200; Screener, LiveKit, coturn, and nginx are active with NRestarts=0.

The release deploys the single Browser screener-v8 wire, random four-digit memory rooms with a 24-hour dormant lease, orthogonal grant/code admission, 20-Viewer room admission, the uniform endpoint media-copy cap 2, the one-controller exact-candidate route runtime, and stale-v7 rejection before room authority. The service unit has no writable room StateDirectory; all room authority is process-memory-only. LiveKit is dedicated, has room.auto_create: false and max_participants: 21, and is admitted to one global publication ingress plus twenty subscription egress handles. Coturn listens only on UDP 3478 for STUN; LiveKit media listens on UDP 7882. These bounds are fail-safe admissions, not throughput or quality claims. The retained local 20-Viewer Browser smoke and open real-network boundaries are owned by verification status.

Topology and prerequisites

Use two DNS names, for example share.example.com and stun.example.com. They may resolve to the same public IP: the Web ingress owns TCP 443 while the self-hosted STUN listener owns UDP 3478.

browser -- HTTPS/WSS --> Caddy or nginx :443 --> Node.js :8787
browser <------------ DTLS-SRTP P2P ------------> browser
browser -- STUN binding/UDP --> coturn :3478 (application advertises STUN only)
browser <---------- DTLS-SRTP/UDP ----------> LiveKit :7882

The minimum runtime is Node.js 24 LTS and coturn 4.17.2 or a newer patched release. Provision a valid TLS certificate for the Web name. Enable operating system time synchronization and keep the Node application port reachable only from its reverse proxy. A single Node process is intentional. Rooms, participants, and signaling remain in process memory; a restart intentionally invalidates every room and does not restore live WebRTC connections.

Build and validate the exact revision on a build host before starting it:

npm ci
npm run check
npm start

Do not run the repository full check, typecheck, or build on the current 960 MiB no-swap production host. An inactive-release check before the 261e980c cutover temporarily starved HTTP and SSH; exact 691863e remained current and all four services stayed at NRestarts=0. The retained production path uses a locally verified dist artifact plus one npm ci --omit=dev --ignore-scripts --no-audit --no-fund in a transient unit bounded to 30% CPU, 160 MiB memory high, 256 MiB memory max, no swap, and 120 seconds. It then runs only runtime imports and the artifact/inode/permission gates.

Each immutable release must own an independent dependency tree. Never hard-link node_modules or another file that deployment may chown, chmod, replace, or remove: metadata changes would also mutate the rollback release. A copy or copy-on-write reflink is acceptable only after an inode audit confirms that the old and new regular-file sets have zero shared inodes. Do not recursively change permissions until that check passes.

Either a POSIX archive or ZIP is acceptable transport. Build an explicit runtime manifest before upload, normalize every relative entry path, and reject absolute paths, .. traversal, unexpected top-level entries, and unapproved links. Verify the uploaded archive hash, extract only into a new release directory, then compare the exact path set, file types, sizes, and per-file hashes with the manifest before switching. Archive format alone is neither integrity nor rollback evidence.

In a strict-shell deployment, expected service states are data, not command failures. Do not call systemctl is-active bare under set -e/ERR: an intentionally stopped service returns a nonzero status and can trigger a false rollback. Read ActiveState with systemctl show, compare the returned string explicitly, and keep stop, symlink switch, start, health check, and rollback as separate steps. Preflight every inspection dependency before taking a backup or changing a service. After a start, poll health for a short bounded window instead of treating one request during startup as a failed release; retain the last failure while still enforcing the deadline. After starting coturn, likewise wait boundedly for its UDP 3478 socket before asserting STUN readiness; ActiveState=active can precede socket readiness.

Run npm start under a service supervisor that injects the environment, restarts on failure, and applies bounded logs. For a simple untracked environment file, the equivalent direct launch is node --env-file=.env.production dist/server/server/index.js. Do not expose port 8787 to the Internet. The application default is 0.0.0.0 for LAN development and container compatibility, while the bare-metal production baseline below explicitly sets LISTEN_HOST=127.0.0.1 because only the same-host reverse proxy should connect. A container can instead use 0.0.0.0 and enforce the intended boundary with port publishing rules or a host firewall.

The optional same-host LiveKit layout needs no additional public hostname: LIVEKIT_URL=wss://share.example.com and nginx proxies only current /rtc/v1* requests to LiveKit. Retired /rtc and /rtc/validate endpoints return 404 without request-target logging. LiveKit's HTTP/WebSocket listener on TCP 7880 is private to nginx and the Screener process uses LIVEKIT_API_URL=http://127.0.0.1:7880 for RoomService; WebRTC media reaches LiveKit directly on UDP 7882. No unrelated application may create rooms on this instance, and its tracked configuration sets room.auto_create: false. Install screener-livekit-readiness.conf.example as a screener.service.d drop-in on this layout. After= orders the services, while the bounded ExecStartPre waits for TCP 7880 readiness; ActiveState alone does not prove the LiveKit control listener is accepting connections.

Candidate boundary and rollback

The accepted target for share.bonfire.icu remains distributed and automatic: direct/peer UDP first, with one Host publication available to authorized SFU subscriptions when a logical edge cannot use peer transport. SFU-fed and peer-fed endpoints use the same provisional-child transaction, and the exact candidate child's first newly decoded frame commits that edge. Server-assisted subscriptions and allocations use independent deployment admission rather than an endpoint-cap or fixed-root rule.

The repository requires STUN and ordinary peer connections receive STUN-only ICE. An existing logical edge prefers direct/peer UDP; the only application suffix is the Host publication/SFU path. LiveKit participants receive only revision-bound sfu-config URL/token messages and negotiate within LiveKit's separate UDP-only ICE domain.

PEER_ASSISTED_MEDIA=true is the process-wide topology/SFU switch. Every normal room gets its own bounded controller state and ordinary peer connections remain STUN-only. Run candidate releases on an isolated instance/hostname and keep the old release unchanged for rollback. If the candidate fails, roll back the release or instance; do not add a permanent dual-transport branch.

A memory-room release starts with empty process authority. Starting the candidate invalidates every current production room, Host token, invitation, password verifier, and route; open pages must refresh or explicitly create a replacement room. No room state crosses a release boundary in either direction. Preserve the immutable current release and the recorded environment, unit, LiveKit, coturn, firewall, and reverse-proxy rollback artifact unchanged, and restore that exact boundary if postflight fails.

A shared-public-IP instance can test candidate behavior, but it cannot prove the clean-port boundary or approve broad migration. The room-1 smoke uses this shape: nginx owns 443, LiveKit 1.13.5 owns UDP 7882, and LiveKit is fail-closed under a 192 MiB high/256 MiB hard cgroup limit with restart disabled. Prefer a separate VM/IP for the full gate and verify representative external networks and devices.

Coturn provides STUN binding only and must reject allocation requests. HTTPS/WSS always remains TLS/TCP independently of the UDP-only media ladder.

Production application environment

Keep the real values in the process secret store or an untracked, access-restricted environment file. Node.js 24 can load such a file with --env-file; the tracked .env.example is only a schema. Generate independent secrets with a password manager or a cross-platform Node command such as:

node -e "console.log(require('node:crypto').randomBytes(32).toString('base64url'))"

Use this production baseline template:

NODE_ENV=production
LISTEN_HOST=127.0.0.1
PORT=8787
PUBLIC_BASE_URL=https://share.example.com
ALLOWED_ORIGINS=https://share.example.com
SITE_ACCESS_PASSWORD=<INDEPENDENT_8_TO_128_BYTE_ACCESS_KEY>
ROOM_LEASE_SECONDS=86400
MAX_ROOMS=1000
MAX_VIEWERS_PER_ROOM=20
ENDPOINT_MEDIA_COPY_CAPACITY=2

STUN_URLS=stun:stun.example.com:3478

To make automatic SFU fallback capacity available, add the complete tuple:

PEER_ASSISTED_MEDIA=true
LIVEKIT_URL=wss://share.example.com
LIVEKIT_API_URL=http://127.0.0.1:7880
LIVEKIT_API_KEY=<GENERATED_LIVEKIT_API_KEY>
LIVEKIT_API_SECRET=<INDEPENDENT_SECRET_OF_AT_LEAST_32_BYTES>
SFU_INGRESS_CAPACITY=<MEASURED_DEPLOYMENT_INGRESS_COPIES>
SFU_EGRESS_CAPACITY=<MEASURED_DEPLOYMENT_EGRESS_COPIES>

Supplying any stale PEER_ICE_TURN_* or SELECTED_EDGE_TURN_* key, even blank, fails startup. Production contains none of those keys, uses the tracked STUN-only coturn configuration, and keeps TCP 3478/5349 plus every relay range closed. A rollback restores an exact recorded release, environment, coturn configuration, and firewall snapshot as one unit.

PEER_ASSISTED_ROOM_IDS is retired. Supplying it, even blank, fails startup so that a stale room-1 deployment cannot silently retain the old scope. With PEER_ASSISTED_MEDIA=true, every normal room receives peer-assisted routing, optional LiveKit fallback, and the same deployment resource/fanout/failure guards. Every ordinary peer connection remains STUN-only. There is no browser control, percentage rollout, or second router.

ALLOWED_ORIGINS must list exact http or https origins, never *. SITE_ACCESS_PASSWORD is required in production and must contain 8 through 128 visible ASCII bytes (0x21 through 0x7e). It must not be reused for LiveKit, TLS, or another service. It authorizes room creation, Host role, and code-only Viewer attempts; it does not replace a private room grant or password. Local development and tests may omit it. Supplying a removed access key, even blank, fails startup. ROOM_LEASE_SECONDS defaults to 86,400 seconds and owns the dormant room lifetime. An actively connected Host prevents expiry; explicit stop or Host disconnect starts the lease, and only the exact Host token renews it before expiry. Viewer activity never renews ownership. ROOM_DATABASE_PATH and ROOM_TTL_SECONDS fail startup even when blank. Production 8f5b3f1 accepts 1 through 20 and explicitly selects 20. This is an admission limit, not evidence that every publisher, network, or quality profile can sustain that many streams. ENDPOINT_MEDIA_COPY_CAPACITY defaults to 2 and accepts only 1, 2, or 3. It is the single server-authoritative steady outbound media-copy cap for Host and Viewer endpoints; role, browser, UA, and visibility do not create another tier. A peer child or the Host's single SFU publication consumes one copy and upstream receive is free. Transition work may reach only min(C + 1, 3). A Host already sending three copies at C=3 must fail or wait before a fourth endpoint copy is issued. Supplying the removed MAX_PEER_RELAY_DOWNSTREAM_EDGES, even blank, fails startup.

Production release 8f5b3f1 runs the deployed server and Browser assets atomically on screener-v8; stale v7 Browser and executable-sender wires fail before room authority. Native senders and helpers are outside this release. Restore only an exact recorded release with its matching environment, unit, LiveKit, coturn, and firewall snapshot when rolling back.

The four LIVEKIT_* values must either all be absent or all be present, and a complete tuple requires PEER_ASSISTED_MEDIA=true plus explicit positive safe-integer SFU_INGRESS_CAPACITY and SFU_EGRESS_CAPACITY values. The two capacities have no defaults and must be selected from the instance's measured publisher/subscriber/bitrate and accepted concurrency matrix. Supplying either capacity without the complete fallback configuration fails startup rather than silently enabling or ignoring a partial policy. An empty tuple with neither capacity keeps the optional SDK and server path dormant. LIVEKIT_URL must be a plain ws: or wss: origin with no /rtc suffix; production requires wss:. LIVEKIT_API_URL must be a plain http: or https: origin with no path; production permits plaintext only on loopback and otherwise requires https:. LIVEKIT_API_SECRET must contain at least 32 bytes and must not reuse SITE_ACCESS_PASSWORD. These credentials authorize short-lived LiveKit room tokens and do not provide E2EE: the LiveKit operator can access ordinary SFU media. The LiveKit instance is dedicated to this Screener process and has room.auto_create: false. Screener first binds the configured application listener exclusively; a competing process that cannot bind makes no LiveKit call. While bound but not initialized it returns 503 and has no signaling upgrade handler. It then rejects any foreign room name, deletes every stale managed room, confirms the namespace empty, and begins serving. Each exact-generation room is then created before its token is issued. Reserved, committed, and draining generations remain charged until DeleteRoom succeeds and a follow-up lookup proves absence. Run only one application process until a shared atomic admission and lifecycle owner exists.

For the first candidate canary, use an isolated instance and one recorded room. Restart the application, verify startup removes the now-stale managed LiveKit room before serving traffic, and create a fresh application room after startup. Hold the application port with another process and verify a competing startup makes zero LiveKit calls. Verify that both the replacement room and a second normal room contain mediaMode: "peer-assisted", with independent route revisions and no shared room state or capacity bypass. Exercise join, offer and answer, stale-token reconnect after abort, Host signaling loss with and without a live Host participant, stop, restart, and room deletion in both rooms. Confirm each drain keeps capacity charged until the room is absent. Ordinary Web clients remain STUN-only. Roll back by stopping Screener, proving every managed LiveKit room absent, and restoring the exact recorded application environment, application release, LiveKit configuration, coturn configuration, and firewall snapshot as one unit; or direct traffic to the unchanged old instance. During migration, remove retired route configuration in the same coherent change; the process flag explicitly enables the all-room controller.

Only POST /api/site-access accepts the site access secret in an Authorization: Bearer header from an exact allowed Origin. Success returns a 12-hour stateless HMAC-SHA256 cookie with HttpOnly, SameSite=Strict, Path=/, bounded Max-Age, and, under production HTTPS, Secure plus an __Host- name. The cookie contains no account or server-side session ID. There is no account database, JWT, session map, or logout endpoint.

Before an access-boundary release, set CHROME_PATH to a local Chrome or Chromium executable and run npm run gate:access-privacy. The gate creates a loopback in-memory room with an isolated browser profile, navigates the fragment through CDP rather than a process argument, disposes that context, and emits only fixed booleans and counts. It checks tracked request/nginx/application logs, browser storage, fragment cleanup, absence of a persistent room file, and runs the complete signaling suite containing the strong rotate/revoke teardown case. It never connects to production or accepts a production credential; exact production request/nginx/journal inspection remains separate.

nginx limits this exact endpoint per source at 5r/m with burst=5 nodelay and returns 429 when exhausted. The limiter uses nginx shared memory; do not add the secret, Authorization header, request body, or a new source-address field to logs. POST /api/rooms accepts only the site-access cookie and strict JSON with an explicit code-entry policy and optional room password; a Bearer header is not an alternate creation path. /signal still admits a cookie-free browser after Origin and capacity checks and records the cookie state at upgrade. Host requires it with the room Host token. A Viewer may omit it only when presenting a valid, unexpired grant for that exact room; otherwise the server rejects before evaluating code entry.

Every room receives an independent invitation /r/{code}#v={room-scoped-grant}; the fragment does not enter HTTP or WebSocket request targets. The page validates it, writes it only to that room's sessionStorage, and immediately replaces the visible URL with /r/{code}. The Host may update or revoke that grant without changing code-entry policy.

Room allocation and lifetime use one deliberately small model:

• random unallocated codes come only from 1000 through 9999, never duplicate an active code, respect MAX_ROOMS <= 9000, and return on room release;
• active Host sharing does not expire; stop, capture-track end, or Host disconnect starts ROOM_LEASE_SECONDS;
• only the exact Host token resumes and renews before expiry, Viewer activity cannot, and expiry invalidates the code, credentials, verifier, participants, and routes; and
• process restart has the same fail-closed effect.

Code-only entry is independent of the invitation: after site access, open accepts the four-digit code without a room password; password also requires the room password; and disabled rejects code-only entry while a valid grant still enters.

The server keeps only process-memory digests/verifiers for Host tokens, Viewer grants, and optional room passwords. There is no room database, schema, migration, writable room directory, or backup/restore step. The same browser may replay its Host display-name, code-entry, and optional-password creation profile when it explicitly creates a replacement room; this is local convenience, not server-side identity or cross-restart recovery.

Production startup requires one to eight syntactically valid stun: URLs before the server listens. This validates shape only; it does not prove DNS, firewall, NAT mappings, or external STUN reachability. The current application rejects TURN_URLS, TURN_SHARED_SECRET, or TURN_CREDENTIAL_TTL_SECONDS when any key is present, including with an empty value. Remove those obsolete keys from the candidate environment; startup fails instead of pretending they enable compatibility.

The rejected PEER_ICE_TURN_* and SELECTED_EDGE_TURN_* candidate names must remain absent from production and fail startup even when blank. Ordinary peer edges remain STUN-only and the application has no TURN configuration surface.

HTTPS and WSS ingress

Terminate public TLS at Caddy or nginx and proxy every application path to the single Node process. /signal must preserve the WebSocket upgrade, Host, and Origin, and its idle/read timeout must be longer than a normal sharing session. Do not cache /api/* responses. Caddy's minimal same-host form is:

share.example.com {
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8787
}

An equivalent nginx location is:

location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8787;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_read_timeout 1h;
}

The tracked share.bonfire.icu.conf.example follows this simple model and listens directly on public TCP 443. It does not need an SNI transport router. Exact /rtc and pinned-v0 /rtc/validate requests return 404 with access and request-line error logging disabled; only /rtc/v1* is proxied. Current versioned requests carry a short-lived LiveKit JWT in the query string, so no /rtc* target may fall through to the site's ordinary logs.

When Certbot manages the Web certificate, install the tracked reload-nginx.sh as an executable under /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy/. Run certbot renew --dry-run after the first certificate is installed. This hook reloads only the Web ingress.

Keep the proxy's access-log retention bounded and access controlled. Requests to /r/{code} put the room code in the path, so access logs can contain room codes as well as network metadata. They must not be treated as public artifacts. For a private room, the grant remains in the fragment and is not part of that request target. Every code-only attempt requires prior site access; a disabled policy then rejects that path, while a valid grant remains the direct Viewer path.

For a process-level liveness probe, send GET /healthz. A running process returns HTTP 200 with {"status":"ok"} and Cache-Control: no-store; other methods return 405 with Allow: GET. The endpoint does not inspect room state, STUN/SFU reachability, or any external dependency, so use it only to decide whether the Node process can accept HTTP requests. It is not a deployment-readiness or end-to-end media check.

Optional single-node LiveKit fallback

Use the tracked livekit.yaml.example and livekit.service.example as the minimal single-node baseline. Install a reviewed, pinned LiveKit Server release from its official release assets, generate an independent key pair with livekit-server generate-keys, and place only the YAML key mapping in /etc/livekit/keys.yaml. Keep that file owned by the livekit service account with mode 0600; put the same values in Screener's untracked process secrets.

The example deliberately omits Redis and every recording, ingress, egress, webhook, external-TURN, and embedded-TURN service. It explicitly sets tcp_port: 0 and allow_tcp_fallback: false, and points stun_servers at the deployment's self-hosted STUN listener so pinned LiveKit cannot inherit its default public Google STUN servers. Do not add Redis for this one-node workload. The service journal is the diagnostic log; keep its retention finite and access restricted. Pinned LiveKit 1.13.5 includes raw PublisherOffer SDP in info-level join records, so the tracked production baseline uses logging.level: warn and pion_level: error. Raise either only in an isolated, short-lived canary and remove its journal afterward. Never persist JWTs, SDP, ICE candidates, API secrets, or full /rtc and /rtc/* request targets.

Configure both the host firewall and the provider firewall independently:

Destination	Protocol	Exposure	Purpose
127.0.0.1:7880	TCP	Private	nginx to LiveKit signaling/API
public host :7882	UDP	Public	WebRTC ICE/UDP mux

LiveKit may listen beyond loopback while it discovers and advertises public media addresses, so the public-firewall denial of TCP 7880 is mandatory; nginx must be its only ingress. UDP 7882 is a direct media listener and must not be placed behind the HTTP reverse proxy. If the host is behind NAT, forward it without port translation and verify the advertised candidate from an external network. UDP-blocked networks are expected to fail clearly in this candidate; do not set rtc.tcp_port above zero, enable TCP fallback, or add TURN to make a canary pass silently.

Self-hosted STUN

This subsection describes the accepted and deployed STUN-only boundary. Production uses the tracked configuration and keeps TCP 3478/5349 plus every relay range closed.

Copy deploy/coturn/turnserver.conf.example to an untracked service-owned location and use the tracked coturn.service.example. The config uses coturn's documented stun-only mode, ignores every TURN allocation request, and disables TCP and TLS client listeners. It has no auth secret, user database, relay port range, certificate, quota, or TURN REST credential. Pinned coturn 4.17.2 deprecates no-dtls, so the tracked config does not use that obsolete switch or claim a separate DTLS listener gate.

On a single-homed public host, automatic listener selection is sufficient. On a multi-homed host, set listening-ip to the intended public interface. Open only UDP 3478 and keep TCP 3478/5349 plus every old relay range closed. The same public IP may serve HTTPS/WSS on TCP 443 and LiveKit media on UDP 7882.

The example writes informational logs to stdout. Apply finite supervisor retention and restrict access because STUN sees client IP addresses. Do not enable verbose or log-binding continuously. stun-only is a hard candidate boundary, not a hidden unauthenticated TURN service.

Open only these public listeners:

Destination	Protocol	Purpose
share.example.com:80	TCP	HTTP redirect and ACME challenge
share.example.com:443	TCP	HTTPS and WSS
stun.example.com:3478	UDP	STUN binding only
host public address :7882	UDP	LiveKit WebRTC ICE/UDP mux

Verification

Run these checks from real external networks before calling the deployment usable:

1. Open the official Trickle ICE sample and test the configured STUN URL. It must produce an srflx candidate over UDP and no relay candidate. Confirm TCP 3478/5349 and the old relay range are closed externally.
2. Create a normal Screener room on two different networks. Confirm media flows and the selected-pair stats report a non-relay path when direct ICE succeeds.
3. On a normal room, exhaust a peer route and verify exactly one Host publication serves only the admitted SFU subscriptions over LiveKit UDP 7882. Peer descendants stay on ordinary direct UDP and every non-server endpoint obeys the configured ENDPOINT_MEDIA_COPY_CAPACITY.
4. Block all UDP and verify bounded recovery ends clearly without ICE/TCP, TURN, or a long pseudo-connected path.
5. Exercise root departure, reconnect, SFU unavailable, route prepare rollback, stop, and source/profile changes. Unaffected subtrees must not migrate.
6. Repeat at 1, 3, 5, and 20 viewers across representative consumer networks. Record selected protocol, RTT, bitrate, frame rate, packet loss, publisher upload/encode load, LiveKit ingress/egress, and final decoded quality. A real public-network 1:20 session remains unverified; the passed local synthetic 1:20 smoke does not replace this heterogeneous-network quality gate.

References: coturn 4.17.2 release, pinned turnserver documentation, the pinned example configuration, RFC6265bis, LiveKit firewall guidance, and the pinned LiveKit configuration sample.