archy/docs/container-lifecycle.md

Container lifecycle

How Archipelago keeps apps in the state you asked for — install, start, stop, restart, uninstall — and how it self-heals without ever resurrecting something you deliberately stopped. Source of truth: core/archipelago/src/container/prod_orchestrator.rs and core/archipelago/src/container/boot_reconciler.rs.

The model: level-triggered, not fire-and-forget

Archipelago does not start a container and hope. A long-running reconciler compares desired state (what the manifests and your explicit choices say should be running) against actual state (what podman reports) and repairs the difference. It is level-triggered: it acts on the current gap every tick, not on a one-time event, so a container that dies, a unit that vanishes, or a reboot that clears everything are all just "the gap is non-zero, close it".

The reconciler is spawned once at boot (BootReconciler) after an initial adopt_existing() pass, and runs every 30 seconds. It finishes an in-flight pull or build before honouring a shutdown signal — it is never interrupted mid-operation.

Concurrency: each app has its own async mutex guarding all mutating operations against the reconciler, so a manual stop and a reconcile tick can't race, but reconciles across different apps still run without serialising against each other.

Desired state has three inputs

For each app the reconciler asks: should this be running right now? The answer comes from three durable signals, checked in this order:

1. Explicitly user-stopped (user-stopped.json). If you stopped an app, its id is recorded and the reconciler leaves it down — it is not a gap to repair. Cleared when you start it again. This is what makes a stop stick across restarts and reboots.
2. Explicitly uninstalled (user-uninstalled.json). Same idea for uninstall: a baseline app you removed stays removed, so self-heal can't reinstall it.
3. Otherwise, the manifest set — every catalog/disk app that isn't stopped or uninstalled should be running.

Dependencies are pulled in: an app that is up requires its declared dependencies, so they are kept up too — but a dependency you explicitly stopped still stays stopped.

The operations

All go through the orchestrator, all take the per-app lock, all are idempotent:

Operation	What it does
adopt	At boot, take ownership of a pre-existing container by name rather than recreating it — preserves data, ports and identity across a daemon restart.
install	Materialise secrets → ensure image (build from a local Dockerfile or use a pre-pulled image) → create and start the container (via Quadlet where enabled).
start / stop	Bring the container up/down and record the desired-state change. A stop writes the app to user-stopped.json.
restart	Stop then start, preserving the container's data and identity.
remove	Stop and remove the container, preserving /var/lib/archipelago/<app>, secrets, credentials and ports — a reinstall or upgrade lands on the same data.
upgrade	Recreate at a new image while preserving data (see the version rules below).
health	Report the container's health from its declared health_check.

Self-heal vs. respecting your choice

The one rule that ties it together: self-heal must never override a deliberate stop or uninstall.

• A container that disappeared while its siblings run — a wedged teardown, a reboot that cleared it — is a hole to repair, and the reconciler rebuilds it from the durable "was running" snapshot.
• A container that is down because you stopped or uninstalled it is a choice, and the reconciler leaves it alone.

A small set of baseline apps are expected to exist from first boot and self-heal when their container is missing — but the user_stopped / user_uninstalled gates are checked first, so even a baseline app you turned off stays off. Getting this wrong in either direction is a real bug: resurrecting a stopped app ignores the operator, and failing to rebuild a crashed one is the fire-and-forget failure the whole design exists to remove.

Migrations never destroy data

Any recreate path — upgrade, reinstall, repair — preserves the app's data directory, its generated secrets, its credentials, its ports, and the container name used for adoption. An update that would roll a version backwards is refused (see the version guard in container::image_versions): the update button never offers a lower version than what is running, so a stale record cannot turn into a downgrade. Version pins are honoured — a pinned app is not "updated" out from under the operator by the catalog.

Inspecting lifecycle state

Run as the archipelago service user:

# what podman actually has
podman ps -a --format '{{.Names}}\t{{.Status}}'

# the durable desired-state signals
cat /var/lib/archipelago/user-stopped.json
cat /var/lib/archipelago/user-uninstalled.json

# the reconciler's decisions
journalctl --user -u archipelago | grep -iE 'reconcile|adopt|install|user.stopped'

Related

• Manifest → Quadlet unit — how the unit the reconciler manages is generated
• App secrets — the ensure_generated_secrets tick that runs before start
• App Manifest Specification — health_check, dependencies, restart fields