rig/README.md

rig

A CLI that turns a pristine Debian server into a hardened, tailnet-joined node — one curl, one command. A second command installs a version-pinned Coolify on a control-plane box.

Philosophy (shared with claudebox): public tool, private state. rig carries plumbing logic only — no hostnames, no bindings, no secrets, nothing about your infrastructure. It takes arguments, does its work, and stores no credential, ever.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/heavy-duty/rig/main/install.sh | bash

Installs the tree to ~/.local/share/rig and links rig onto your PATH (/usr/local/bin when root). Re-run any time to upgrade.

Commands

rig bootstrap <control-plane|workload|runner>

Run as root on the fresh box (over SSH). Convergent — safe to re-run; a second run changes nothing.

rig bootstrap control-plane --hostname my-coolify-box
rig bootstrap workload --hostname my-prod-box
rig bootstrap runner --hostname my-ci-box

• --hostname <name> — tailnet hostname (default: the role name)
• --ts-tag <tag> — tailnet tag to advertise (default: tag:server; the runner role defaults to tag:ci instead, and refuses tag:server outright — see below)

What it does: installs curl ca-certificates unattended-upgrades (and enables periodic unattended upgrades); writes an sshd hardening drop-in (PermitRootLogin prohibit-password, PasswordAuthentication no) and verifies it took effect via sshd -T; sets the system hostname; installs tailscale and joins your tailnet.

Why the drop-in is 00-rig.conf and not 99-. sshd_config is first-wins — "for each keyword, the first obtained value will be used" (sshd_config(5)) — and Include expands its glob in lexical order. Cloud images ship /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/50-cloud-init.conf carrying PasswordAuthentication yes, so a 99- drop-in is read second and every keyword in it is silently discarded. This is the opposite of the last-wins convention most config systems use, and it shipped green here for a month: rig asserted the file existed rather than what sshd actually resolved, and the Incus rehearsal container has no cloud-init drop-in to lose to. Every Hetzner box rig had bootstrapped was still serving passwordauthentication yes. bootstrap now sweeps a stale 99-rig.conf on re-run, and refuses to claim success unless sshd -T agrees.

The pre-auth key: provide it via the TS_AUTHKEY env var or type it at the interactive prompt. Use a single-use, tagged, short-expiry key. It lives in process memory only — rig never writes a credential to disk.

control-plane and workload are identical today except the default hostname; they exist because the boxes diverge over time, and because each follow-up command applies to exactly one role. runner is the box a CI agent will live on, and it differs behaviorally: it defaults --ts-tag to tag:ci and refuses tag:server — a runner executes repo-controlled code, and advertising your server tag would extend every grant your servers hold (SSH between them, say) to that code. The refusal turns the worst misconfiguration from a documentation warning into a hard error.

rig coolify install --version <pin>

Control-plane box only. Installs Coolify at exactly the pinned version with AUTOUPDATE=false — your deploy tooling is verified against an API surface; the platform must never move underneath it on its own. Upgrading is an explicit re-run with a new pin. The pin is required; there is no default.

rig runner install --repo <owner/repo>

Runner box only, run after rig bootstrap runner (the same two-step rhythm as bootstrap control-plane → coolify install):

rig bootstrap runner --hostname my-ci-box
rig runner install --repo acme/widgets

Installs GitHub's official actions/runner as a systemd service under an unprivileged user (default github-runner, created if absent, never root, no supplementary groups). The runner is an agent, not a server: it long-polls GitHub outbound and receives jobs down that already-established connection, so it needs zero inbound ports and works fine behind a deny-all firewall — it can even trigger deploys on hosts only it can reach, like a tailnet-only control plane.

No Docker, deliberately: the Docker socket is a root API and docker group membership is root-equivalent, which is a gratuitous path to root on a box whose whole point is a narrow blast radius. Add Docker only once a job genuinely needs it, and rethink the isolation model then.

• --version <pin> — actions/runner release to install (default: the latest release, resolved at install time; e.g. --version 2.335.1 — the latest as of this writing). Pin it when you need a deterministic, auditable install.
• --name <name> — runner name (default: this host's hostname)
• --labels <csv> — runner labels, replacing the ci-runner default — keep any label your workflows' runs-on needs (GitHub adds self-hosted itself)
• --user <name> — the unprivileged service user (default: github-runner)

The registration token: provide it via the RUNNER_TOKEN env var or type it at the interactive prompt. It's short-lived, consumed at registration, and never written to disk by rig.

Why latest-by-default here when coolify install demands a pin: the two tools age differently. Coolify never self-updates (AUTOUPDATE=false), so its version is a contract your deploy tooling is verified against — stating it is the point. The runner self-updates regardless: GitHub refuses jobs from stale runners, so freezing it would just make it silently stop taking work. The install-time version is a starting point either way; --version exists for when you want that starting point deterministic and auditable.

Convergent — safe to re-run; an already-registered runner is left alone.

What rig deliberately does NOT do

• Provider firewalls — Docker publishes ports past host firewalls, so the real boundary is your cloud provider's firewall, configured outside this tool.
• Fetch your config — boxes never receive repo credentials. Everything rig needs arrives as arguments or an interactive prompt.
• Manage deployments — deploy manifests/executors are separate concerns. (Planned: the apply/diff executor half joins rig as commands that run on operator machines, never on boxes.)

Testing

bash test/cli.sh (dependency-free assertions) + shellcheck run in CI. The end-to-end rehearsal is a throwaway VM/container: pristine Debian → install → bootstrap workload with a real single-use key → assert the sshd drop-in, tailnet join, and a no-op second run → destroy, remove the node from the tailnet.