neohabitat: Docker deployment broken

The Docker deployment for NeoHabitat is currently broken. We’ve been trying to troubleshoot it for a month or two now with varying degrees of success.

Relevant info

Relevant issues to our recent work are: #390 #392

Several PR’s were made during this time to update the deployment and get things working again. The first of these commits starts with commit e7c220d.

During this time, we were able to get things operational again and the fork over at https://github.com/AmandaJonesAway/neohabitat successfully works, but somehow with the PR’s that got merged, the master repository is still in a broken state. It should be noted that AmandaJonesAway’s fork is 15 commits behind master if comparing against it.

Setup

Make sure you have the NeoHabitat installer to test with as it contains a copy of VICE, and the Habitat disk images. You can grab a copy here: https://github.com/StuBlad/neohabitat-installer/releases. If you don’t want to use the installer, the disk images are available in the same repository.

Here are the commands I’m using so you can recreate the environment and replicate the broken build.

Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS) x64

Install Docker using the apt repository as per instructions here (https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/)
git clone https://github.com/frandallfarmer/neohabitat.git
cd neohabitat
sudo docker compose up

It’s not building the schema and filling the object database in this current state, so you’ll need to modify line 46 in docker-compose.yml to true (NEOHABITAT_SHOULD_UPDATE_SCHEMA) and line 49 in run to true (SHOULD_UPDATE_SCHEMA=“${NEOHABITAT_SHOULD_UPDATE_SCHEMA:=true}”) before you run sudo docker compose up.

You’ll only want these set to true for the first time launching this NeoHabitat docker setup to populate the object database. Things will load much faster if you set those configuration options back to false after.

It’ll take a few minutes for all the services to come online after bringing the containers up, but when you see the following log output then you are ready to connect to the server:

neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | May 08, 2023 7:03:36 PM com.mongodb.diagnostics.logging.JULLogger log
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | INFO: Opened connection [connectionId{localValue:2, serverValue:10}] to neohabitatmongo:27017
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | - 2023/05/08 19:03:36.334 EVN cont : loading classDesc 'classes'
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | - 2023/05/08 19:03:36.473 EVN cont : loading static object list 'statics'
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | - 2023/05/08 19:03:36.515 EVN cont : loading static object 'teleports' as 'teleports'

Go into VICE and Settings > RS232 Settings > RS232 Settings. Set RS232 Device 1 to the IP of the NeoHabitat server and port 1986 (127.0.0.1:1986) for example.

Load Habitat-Boot.d64. Press return on the title screen. Type in the name you want for your avatar and press return. When on the main Habitat title screen, press Alt-N and any key and watch the server output.

The actual problem

The title screen should freeze and you’ll see this output in the logs:

neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | debug: Habitat connection from 172.18.0.4:1337
neohabitat-qlink-1              | 2023-05-08 19:06:19,191 [Thread-5] DEBUG org.jbrain.qlink.connection.QConnection  - Sending Habitat Packet: 5A A1 4A B1 49 13 10 20 55 E0 00 03 32 30 30 00
neohabitat-qlink-1              | 2023-05-08 19:06:19,194 [Thread-6] INFO  org.jbrain.qlink.connection.HabitatConnection  - Initiating Habitat Reader thread
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | events.js:165
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         |       throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         |       ^
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         |
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | Error: connect ECONNREFUSED 172.18.0.4:2018
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         |     at TCPConnectWrap.afterConnect [as oncomplete] (net.js:1174:14)
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | Emitted 'error' event at:
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         |     at emitErrorNT (internal/streams/destroy.js:64:8)
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         |     at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:178:19)
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | Program node /neohabitat/bridge/Habitat2ElkoBridge.js -l 0.0.0.0:1337 -e neohabitat:2018 -m neohabitatmongo:27017/elko -c context-Downtown_5f -t debug exited with code 1
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         |
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | Starting child process with 'node /neohabitat/bridge/Habitat2ElkoBridge.js -l 0.0.0.0:1337 -e neohabitat:2018 -m neohabitatmongo:27017/elko -c context-Downtown_5f -t debug'
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | Missing/invalid defaults.elko configuration file. Proceeding with factory defaults.
neohabitat-neohabitat-1         | info: Habitat to Elko Bridge listening on 0.0.0.0:1337

According to the file docker-compose.yml, port 2018 is the NEOHABITAT_BRIDGE_ELKO_HOST.

For some reason, the connection is being refused. When this setup previously worked, we used ip addresses instead of giving a container a name and referring to that instead. I’m wondering if this is what has caused the issue here. We need this port to be accessible and responsive in order to have this Docker setup working again.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created a year ago
Comments: 17 (9 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Ok I’m fairly confident that this line should not be commented out: https://github.com/frandallfarmer/neohabitat/blob/master/docker-compose.yml#L59

Nope. One of the changes I made was to set up a private network in the docker-compose.yml and attach each container to it. This exposes each container on that network to all the others, setting up hostnames as per the container name in the docker-compose.yml. All of a container’s ports are automatically accessible to all other containers in that network. The only time you need to set up a port mapping is it you have any external applications/clients that need to connect in. Hence only 1986 being left enabled, as that’s the port the c64 clients connect to. The other ports are still accessible from any code running within the containers, as long as you use the hostname and not localhost (as that counts as an external address.) Doing this isolates the services, stopping clashes with anything else running in the server (I already had a mariaDB running, for instance) and/or lets you run multiple instances of neohabitat - just change that external port number for each one.

AmandaJonesAway on May 10, 2023

I added some commits to #402 that correct the node dependency issues. There was a volume attached to the neohabitat container that would wipe out all the containers contents with local file system contents causing a disparity between what was installed locally and in the container:

https://github.com/frandallfarmer/neohabitat/blob/master/docker-compose.yml#LL37C1-L38C22

I imagine someone left this in for local development purposes but is unnecessary and detrimental to a deterministic build.

I also separated the package.json hierarchy for bridge and pushserver this seems to resolve the missing node dependencies Stu reported above.

kevzettler on May 10, 2023

Ok here is confirmation that the pushserver/node_modules dependencies are there at build time but missing at run time :

themade@neohabitat:~/neohabitat$ sudo docker run -it --rm --entrypoint ls philcollins/neohabitat /neohabitat/pushserver
README.md  app.js  bin	config.dev.yml	config.prod.yml  config.vagrant.yml  constants	habiproxy  node_modules  package-lock.json  package.json  public  routes  run  views

themade@neohabitat:~/neohabitat$ sudo docker exec 8cff73229076 ls /neohabitat/pushserver
README.md
app.js
bin
config.dev.yml
config.prod.yml
config.vagrant.yml
constants
habiproxy
package-lock.json
package.json
public
routes
run
views

So something is deleting pushserver/node_modules at runtime :\ ??

kevzettler on May 10, 2023

Very strange I was seeing those pushserver dependency issues and that’s what led me to moving the npm install into the Dockerfile. I have confirmed that if I start a new container from the neohabitat image the dependencies are installed in /pushserver/node_modules however if I connect to the already running neohabibtat container the /pushserver/node_modules is missing looking further.

themade@neohabitat:~/neohabitat$ sudo docker run -it --rm --entrypoint ls philcollins/neohabitat /neohabitat/pushserver
README.md  app.js  bin	config.dev.yml	config.prod.yml  config.vagrant.yml  constants	habiproxy  node_modules  package-lock.json  package.json  public  routes  run  views

kevzettler on May 10, 2023

Ok I’m fairly confident that this line should not be commented out: https://github.com/frandallfarmer/neohabitat/blob/master/docker-compose.yml#L59

The following output is copied from Stu’s post above:

caribe@caribe:~/neohabitat$ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                    COMMAND                  CREATED        STATUS          PORTS                                                             NAMES
f6756d968c9d   philcollins/qlink        "/bin/sh -c /usr/loc…"   22 hours ago   Up 14 minutes   0.0.0.0:1986->1986/tcp, :::1986->1986/tcp, 5190/tcp               neohabitat-qlink-1
8a791b052011   philcollins/neohabitat   "/bin/sh -c /neohabi…"   22 hours ago   Up 14 minutes   1337/tcp, 1701/tcp, 1986-1987/tcp, 2018/tcp, 3000/tcp, 9000/tcp   neohabitat-neohabitat-1
7bf2e76ae07e   mongo:4.0                "docker-entrypoint.s…"   25 hours ago   Up 14 minutes   27017/tcp                                                         neohabitat-neohabitatmongo-1
bb5e52d9f7d8   mariadb                  "docker-entrypoint.s…"   25 hours ago   Up 14 minutes   3306/tcp                                                          neohabitat-neohabitatmariadb-1

The ports on the philcollins/neohabitat container are listed but not forwarded. If we uncomment the ports in docker-compose.yml they show up as forwarded

MAGE                    COMMAND                  CREATED         STATUS         PORTS                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             NAMES
0029ce017e8e   philcollins/qlink        "/bin/sh -c /usr/loc…"   4 minutes ago   Up 5 seconds   0.0.0.0:1986->1986/tcp, :::1986->1986/tcp, 5190/tcp                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               neohabitat_qlink_1
e9c22c70462d   philcollins/neohabitat   "/bin/sh -c /neohabi…"   4 minutes ago   Up 6 seconds   0.0.0.0:1337->1337/tcp, :::1337->1337/tcp, 0.0.0.0:1701->1701/tcp, :::1701->1701/tcp, 0.0.0.0:1898->1898/tcp, :::1898->1898/tcp, 0.0.0.0:1987->1987/tcp, :::1987->1987/tcp, 1986/tcp, 0.0.0.0:2018->2018/tcp, :::2018->2018/tcp, 0.0.0.0:9000->9000/tcp, :::9000->9000/tcp, 0.0.0.0:9229->9229/tcp, :::9229->9229/tcp, 3000/tcp   neohabitat_neohabitat_1
ae32c5679d2f   mariadb                  "docker-entrypoint.s…"   4 minutes ago   Up 7 seconds   3306/tcp                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          neohabitat_neohabitatmariadb_1
ea1d8264bbec   mongo:4.0                "docker-entrypoint.s…"   4 minutes ago   Up 7 seconds   27017/tcp                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         neohabitat_neohabitatmongo_1

compare the output and notice the -> indicated ports are now forwarded into the containers.

I haven’t been able to test this yet i’m not setup with the VICE emulator maybe @StuBlad can try it quick.

kevzettler on May 10, 2023