posts: add Drone CI debacle story

content/posts/the-drone-ci-debacle.md

@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
+---
+title: "The Drone CI debacle"
+date: 2020-07-15T11:04:45+02:00
+draft: false # I don't care for draft mode, git has branches for that
+description: "The misadventures of deploying my blog"
+tags:
+  - hugo
+  - drone
+  - docker
+  - CI/CD
+categories:
+  - story
+favorite: false
+---
+
+I wanted to deploy this small website to post small blog posts as the
+inspiration would come. Because I'm stubborn, I wanted to self-host it, however
+I also wanted the process to publish to my website to be as stream-lined as it
+could be. Therefore, I decided to have it continuously delivered so that
+pushing a new commit to my server would automatically build the changes and
+serve them.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+## Drone
+
+### The problem
+
+I had wanted to install [Drone CI](https://drone.io/) on my server for a while.
+I already have a plethora of self-hosted services on my server, and after
+reading the docs I thought it would be deployed and ready to use in no time.
+
+Instead it took me a few hours over a week before I got it working. I would run
+the container in `docker-compose`, it would display its logs happily, but
+nothing happened if I tried to connect to it.
+
+### Debugging
+
+My service definition looked something like this :
+
+```yaml
+drone-server:
+  image: drone/drone:1
+  container_name: drone-server
+  restart: unless-stopped
+  env_file:
+    - ./drone/drone.env
+    - ./drone/drone.env.secret
+  volumes:
+    - ./drone:/data
+  ports:
+    - 8080:8080 # Exposed for debugging purposes
+  depends_on:
+    - gitea # My self-hosted Gitea instance
+  user: 1000:1000
+```
+
+I tried everything on port `8080`, `firefox` did not show anything, neither 
+did `wget`. I even tried to execute `wget` inside the `drone-server` container,
+to no avail!
+
+I tried listing the open ports, both outside and inside the container. I tried
+activating the debug logging, and I could not see anything out of the ordinary.
+
+I then tried launching the container directly on the command line, instead of
+using a `docker-compose` service. Here's the command I used:
+
+```sh
+docker run --rm \
+    --publish=8080:80 \
+    --name=drone \
+    --env-file shipyard/drone/drone.env \
+    -v `pwd`/drone/:/data \
+    drone/drone:1
+```
+
+Navigating to port `8080` now redirected me to my `Gitea` login page, as it
+should be!
+
+I was puzzled, as I could not see *any* difference between my service definition
+and the command line I was launching.
+
+### Resolution
+
+The keen-eyed among you might have already seen the difference between those
+two container instances... A single option was missing in my `docker run`
+command which, had I included it, would have kept it from working too.
+
+Have you found it yet? It's the `user: ...` line. I felt like a fool when
+I finally spotted the difference. I removed it, and my service was now up and
+running.
+
+The logs showed no difference, nothing was complaining about the rights on
+disk, the SQLite database was still created either way. But this line was the
+difference between a working instance and a non-working one.