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SPEC: each requirement once, lists moved to docs/, repeats and sections dropped
Every requirement the second review found in two to five places is now
stated once, with links from the other places. "Risks the design has to
handle", "Rollout per service" and most of "Architecture" are gone, their
two points of their own moved to "Attack detection" and "Anomaly
thresholds". The request log's fields, the metrics and the image's
contents move to docs/request-log.md, docs/metrics.md and docs/image.md,
each linked from the spec. The off rule names SWWAF_LOOKUP_SOURCE and
SWWAF_WAF_MODE, the reputation bound is given, and the six Core Rule Set
changes are a numbered list.

Model: fable-5-1
2026-10-22 20:43:32 +00:00

57 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown

# What the image holds
The `smallwebwaf` image is the base of each app's own image. The requirements
are under "Deployment" in [`SPEC.md`](../SPEC.md); this file lists what the
image holds, how each part is pinned, and why.
## Contents
- Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, the newest long-term support release of Ubuntu, pinned by
digest. The image moves to the next LTS release when that ships.
- `ca-certificates`, `nix-bin` and `runit` from Ubuntu, installed from a dated
snapshot of its archive and checked by hash. The Ubuntu image has no CA
certificates; without them Nix cannot download packages and `smallwebwaf`
cannot reach GeoJS.
- Nix and nixpkgs, fixed at one release. Root uses Nix directly; no Nix daemon
runs. `nix-bin` creates no build users, so `build-users-group =` in
`/etc/nix/nix.conf` lets root build without them.
- runit, and `runsvinit` as the entrypoint, as the owner's code style guide asks
for service containers. No package carries `runsvinit`, so the image builds it
from its archived source (`github.com/peterbourgon/runsvinit`, unchanged
since 2015) at a fixed commit hash, with a `go.mod` the build writes.
`runsvinit` starts runit's `runsvdir`, which runs the `run` script of each
directory under `/etc/service` and runs it again whenever it exits. Ubuntu's
`sv` looks for services there too.
- The `smallwebwaf` binary, and a user of its own, `smallwebwaf` (uid and gid
65532).
- The service directory `/etc/service/smallwebwaf`. Its `run` script waits one
second (`sleep 1`), makes `SWWAF_STATE_DIR` and every file in it belong to the
`smallwebwaf` user, and starts `smallwebwaf` as that user with runit's
`chpst`.
- The directory `/var/lib/smallwebwaf` for the state files, and
`/etc/smallwebwaf/rules.d` with the default rule file.
- Port 8080 declared (`EXPOSE 8080`), and the health check (`HEALTHCHECK`) that
"The health check" in `SPEC.md` describes.
## Pinning
- Ubuntu's packages come from Ubuntu's snapshot service, the archive as it was
at the moment the Dockerfile names (`--snapshot 20261001T000000Z`), never
earlier than the pinned Ubuntu image's date. The Dockerfile names the SHA-256
hash of each of the snapshot's `InRelease` files, which cover every package
list and so every package, and the build checks them before installing. The
hashes are the amd64 archive's, so the image is built for amd64 only. The
snapshot is fetched over HTTPS with the CA certificates of the Go image that
builds `smallwebwaf`, itself pinned by digest, since the Ubuntu image has
none.
- nixpkgs comes from a release file on `releases.nixos.org` (`nixexprs.tar.xz`
of `nixos-26.05.11045.774debe7a0d1`), named with its SHA-256 hash, not from a
GitHub archive, whose bytes can change. It is set up for root as `nixpkgs`.
Root's Nix profile, `/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin`, is last on the
`PATH`, so that no package hides the image's own commands; busybox's `sv`, for
one, looks for services elsewhere. Unpacked, nixpkgs takes about 500 MiB.
- An app built on the image gets the same packages each time it is built.
Security fixes from Ubuntu and nixpkgs come with a newer `smallwebwaf` image,
which an app takes by changing the digest in its `FROM` line. The image moves
to each new nixpkgs release, every six months.