Zip building moved onto its own queue, which a manual install's worker
has to be told about. update.sh repairs the service file and Docker is
unaffected, so the population left is somebody upgrading by hand who
skipped the release note — and for them the failure is the worst shape
available. Email keeps going out perfectly. Zip downloads never finish.
Nothing in any log says why, because nothing went wrong: the jobs sit on
a queue nobody is reading. The person who missed it has no reason to
suspect anything, so the notice has to go looking for them.
The application cannot see its own worker processes, only whether work
gets done, so the question is asked from the other end: was a build
requested that no worker ever picked up? That needs a record of when a
build *started*, which is what the new zip_downloads.started_at column
is — stamped before any of the work, so it says a worker had the row,
not that the row succeeded.
Two conditions, because either alone cries wolf. A build has waited past
five minutes and was never started, *and* no other build is in hand. The
second matters because one worker builds one archive at a time: a queue
behind a large build is a healthy queue, and its waiting rows look
exactly like abandoned ones until you notice something running. "In
hand" is bounded by the job's own timeout, so a worker that died holding
a build stops counting as alive an hour later.
The banner sits beside the stale-code one, on every staff page rather
than the dashboard alone, gated on view_system_info for the reason that
one already argues: a background worker not picking work up is a fact
about the machine, not a feature of an edition. It names the fix rather
than the symptom — "your worker command needs --queue=default,zips" —
because somebody reading that downloads are not being processed still
has to work out what to do about it.
Eight tests, covering both halves of the discrimination rather than just
the happy one: a queue waiting behind a live build stays quiet, and a
build held by a worker that died does not.
Translated into all sixteen locales in the same commit, since a release
is close and a banner nobody can read is worse than none.
Checked on screen as well as in assertions, with a real stalled row on
the dev stack: the banner renders, wraps, and reads correctly.
Updating a server install cost nine artisan invocations plus a PHP-FPM
reload, written out in three places that had already drifted apart. One
of those steps is silently fatal to skip: with opcache.validate_timestamps
off — what production guides recommend and what our own image ships — the
database moves to the new version while every visitor keeps being served
the old code, and artisan reports the new version throughout.
`sudo ./update.sh` is now the whole procedure. It asks whether to check
GitHub, asks whether to download the release and verifies the checksum
published beside it, and asks whether there is a backup — offering to dump
the database when the answer is no. Then it takes the site down, replaces
the files, runs the update, reloads PHP-FPM, restarts the worker and
brings the site back. The application still has no self-updater: nothing
is fetched or applied unless somebody runs this and answers yes.
Underneath it is `php artisan projectsend:update`, which is everything an
update does that needs no root — and now the only definition of it. Both
container entrypoints call it instead of carrying their own copy of the
sequence, so the two paths cannot drift again.
Three findings worth keeping in the record, all from rehearsing rather
than reasoning:
- queue:restart has to come last. It writes its signal into the cache,
so clearing the cache afterwards deletes it and the worker runs old
code forever.
- optimize:clear is not safe to recommend. It runs cache:clear, which
on Redis is FLUSHDB — harmless on the default two-database layout,
but on a single-database Redis it takes the sessions and the queue
with it. The compiled caches are cleared individually instead.
- update.sh overwrites itself mid-run, because the zip contains it and
bash reads its own script lazily by byte offset. It re-execs from a
temporary copy before touching anything.
And when the reload is skipped anyway, the application now says so:
projectsend:update records the version it applied, and any staff page
compares that with what the running process actually compiled. The same
check catches the mirror image — new files in place, update never run.
Rehearsed end to end against real installs: a container upgrade (69 to 73
migrations, key and data intact, healthy), a scripted update on a real
nginx + php-fpm install with OPcache pinned (web process moved 2.1.0 to
2.1.1), the skipped-reload case (banner appears naming both versions, and
clears on reload), the refusals (downgrade, non-release zip, truncated
zip, URL passed to --zip, non-root), a database taken down mid-update
(site comes back out of maintenance mode by itself), and a real download
of the published 2.0.0 zip with its checksum verified.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Client file sharing, rebuilt from the ground up: a private area per
client, resumable uploads, folders, groups and categories, sharing with
expiry dates and download limits, comments, file versions, an activity
log, a REST API, and sixteen languages.
This repository begins here. ProjectSend 2 was developed privately, and
that development history is not published — the previous generation
remains available, with its own history, at projectsend/legacy.
Free software under the GNU General Public License v2, or (at your
option) any later version.
ignacionelson