README: this service deploys from CI and scales to zero - #8
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Deploy automation was deferred so a human could watch the first-ever
deploy of new infrastructure, with a note to automate once phase 1 was
stable. Phase 1 is stable, and leaving it deferred turned out worse than
what it avoided: fly.toml only took effect if someone remembered to run
`fly deploy` by hand.
That failed silently on 2026-09-09. A scale-to-zero change merged with
CI fully green and never reached Fly — the app kept running always-on,
and the config looked applied because the commit was on master. It was
only caught by checking the machine state directly. Config that silently
doesn't apply is more dangerous than no config, because it reads as done.
Deploy runs on push to master only, after BOTH matrix legs (sqlite and
postgres) pass — this service runs one codebase against either dialect,
so a green sqlite leg alone is not evidence a deploy is safe.
Two flags, each for a concrete reason:
--strategy immediate this app mounts sentinel_license_data, and the
default rolling strategy stands up a parallel
machine first, which errors on the volume's
single attachment slot.
--ha=false Fly otherwise provisions two machines. It did
exactly that on the manual deploy of the sibling
Sync service and the extra had to be scaled away
by hand; the volume could not serve two anyway.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
No Dependabot config existed here. That is the same gap that produced the Sentinel AI agent's three production breakages in two days: mcp 2.x renaming a symbol, Starlette removing on_startup, and a ceiling added to stop the second one silently pinning the service to a Starlette line carrying 7 advisories. All three surfaced on a rebuild of a repo nobody had rebuilt since June. `pip-audit --strict` in CI catches a known advisory against what is already pinned. It does nothing about a lockfile quietly ageing out of support, which is the failure that actually happened. No auto-merge workflow, deliberately. This repo now deploys to Fly on push to master, and GitHub does not trigger `on: push` workflows for commits pushed with GITHUB_TOKEN — so an auto-merge would land a bump on master WITHOUT deploying it, and nothing would report an error. That is an observed bug in Sentinel-Command, where four frontend bumps merged and never shipped. A human merge triggers the deploy normally. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two claims were false. "First deploy is manual by design — deploy automation is deferred" stopped being true when the deploy job landed; leaving it deferred had made fly.toml a file that did nothing, and a scale-to-zero change merged green and never reached Fly. And nothing documented that the service now sleeps between check-ins, or why that is safe (4s boot inside Fly's ~8s proxy window, 10s caller timeout, and a 72-hour grace window on the Command Center side). Also records the condition that would reverse it: a licence check moving onto a user-blocking path turns a 4s cold start into a 4s page stall. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Documentation only — no code changes.
Both claims in this README about how the service is deployed were false after 2026-09-09's infrastructure work, and a README that describes a system confidently and wrongly is worse than one that says nothing, because nobody goes looking for a second source.
Brings it in line with what actually runs, and records the reasoning so the next person doesn't have to rediscover it.
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