Idempotent Vibe Coding

I am beginning to hate this word. The RunC problem in docker/Proxmox is giving a great deal of heartache as it has caused substantial ramifications. I have a good mine to role everything back but am not giving up yet.

No, the response doesn't relate to the RunC problem but another I am working on to bring myself up to enterprise level docker security. I am rolling back on my backups a lot this morning.

The previous post may be pulled yet - I had a hunch - and it appears to be right.

That’s a smart question, Leon. The short answer: no, repeated runs won’t break your environment if you’re careful, because the script was designed to be idempotent — meaning it checks whether certs already exist before regenerating them, and overwrites daemon configuration in a controlled way. But there are a few nuances worth keeping in mind:

⚙️ What Happens on Re‑runs

• CA and client certs: The script skips regeneration if they already exist. So, you won’t accidentally overwrite your CA unless you delete ca.pem or ca-key.pem.
• Server certs: Same logic — if a cert already exists for a host, it won’t regenerate unless you remove it.
• Deployment: Each run re‑copies certs to the host and rewrites daemon.json. That’s safe, but it does restart Docker every time.
• Audit logs: Each run creates a new logfile with a timestamp, so you’ll have a clear trail of what happened on each attempt.

⚠️ Potential Pitfalls

• Docker restart impact: Every run restarts the Docker daemon on each host. If you’re running containers that don’t have restart policies, they could stop unexpectedly.
• CA key security: If you accidentally regenerate the CA, all existing certs become invalid. That’s why the script avoids overwriting unless you delete files.
• SAN/IP mismatch: If hostnames or IPs change, you’ll need to regenerate certs. Re‑running without updating SANs will cause TLS errors.
• Debugging loops: If you keep running while fixing bugs, you’ll just keep overwriting daemon.json and restarting Docker. That’s fine, but noisy.

✅ Best Practices for Debugging

• Run in dry‑run mode first (we can add a flag to skip deployment and just generate certs/logs).
• Test against one host before rolling out to all four.
• Keep a backup of your current /etc/docker/daemon.json and certs before first run.
• Use docker ps --restart=always or --restart=unless-stopped on critical containers so they survive daemon restarts.

So: you can safely re‑run while debugging, but the main risk is Docker restarts interrupting workloads. If you want, I can extend the script with a --dry-run option that generates certs and logs but doesn’t touch the servers, so you can debug without impacting your live Proxmox hosts.

Would you like me to add that dry‑run mode so you can test safely before doing full deployments?

Here’s the updated script with a --dry-run option. When enabled, it will generate and log certificates locally but skip deployment, daemon.json changes, and Docker restarts. This way you can safely test the workflow without touching your Proxmox hosts.

🔎 How to Use

Full run (deploy + restart Docker):

./docker-tls-setup-audit.sh

Dry run (safe test, no deployment):

./docker-tls-setup-audit.sh --dry-run

This way you can generate certs, see audit logs, and confirm everything works locally before touching your live Proxmox Docker daemons.

Would you like me to also add a --single-host <hostname> option, so you can test against just one server before rolling out to all four?

You bet your Silicon; we are doing a dry run, and that is so tempting but we are doing a dry run so - thinking.

#enoughsaid