Answering a CI-posture question from vastblue-dev meant measuring three
things rather than recalling them. Two came back the opposite of the way
the config reads:
- `container.valid_volumes: []` does NOT keep the docker daemon out of
jobs. act_runner mounts /var/run/docker.sock on its own, so every job
on the shared runner is uid 0 with `docker ps` over all 49 containers
on ana-docker — gitea, synapse, phasefinal-web, adguardhome included.
It is also load-bearing: four repos drive buildx through it, so the
fix is isolation onto a dedicated runner, not tightening this one.
- A full-URL `uses: https://gitea.phasefinal.com/actions/checkout@v4`
resolves from the local mirrors today. That is github-independence per
workflow without the DEFAULT_ACTIONS_URL flip that has been parked on
act_runner's action-fetch auth since 2026-08-05.
Also recorded: `services:` containers work (Postgres 16 on the service
name), job images need a node binary for JS actions, and `/actions/runs`
lists runs that `/actions/tasks` reports as empty on gitea 1.26.1.
Measured on a throwaway repo under the claude-bot account, since deleted.
config.yaml change is comment-only and deliberately not deployed — it
would bounce the runner for no runtime effect.
Central runner on ana-docker (gitea is local; existing fleet tooling
already SSHes from there). Playbook is parameterized so future
site-local runners (nh3-docker, esh-docker-vm) drop in via --var
overrides instead of copy-paste.
Includes a workflow template for vh/task-board that calls the existing
deploy-task-board.yaml playbook — keeps the playbook as the single
source of truth for "how task-board is deployed", manual or automated.
Labels embed `:docker://node:20-bookworm-slim` schema; without it,
act_runner v0.6+ silently falls back to host-mode and runs job steps
inside the Alpine runner container (no apt/python/node), breaking any
real workflow. node:20-bookworm-slim is small + has git + node so
actions/checkout works out of the box.
vh