The target Pi only has MariaDB, and SQL Server has no ARM64 build at
all - not a config problem, a real gap discovered during deployment
setup. Swapped the EF Core provider, regenerated every migration,
updated connection strings and the backup script everywhere they
appear.
Took two tries to land on a provider that actually works: Pomelo
builds fine against this project's EF Core 10 packages but fails at
runtime (it's compiled against 9's internal API surface, which moved
in 10 wherever Identity/DataProtection force the newer packages).
Oracle's official provider builds and migrates fine but has a real
MariaDB bug in its own migration-lock code, reproduced against a live
database. Kept Oracle's provider and worked around just that one
broken method - everything else it does is correct - rather than
give up more of the stack to chase a workaround.
Verified against a real local MariaDB end to end: all three
migrations applied, both hosts start clean, full suite still green.
Nothing here is visible in normal operation. Its whole purpose is that
swapping the release directory on deploy cannot silently destroy state.
Data Protection secures the API keys that authenticate master/slave
communication. Two separate defaults would each have destroyed them:
keys are held on the filesystem, which a release swap discards, and the
application discriminator is derived from the content root path, which
changes with every release directory — so even keys stored in a database
would have stopped being derivable. Keys now live in
ApplicationDbContext and the discriminator is a fixed constant.
Losing them produces no error. It produces stored keys that no longer
decrypt, which presents as an apparent network fault between a Master
and its slaves and is easily misdiagnosed. That is also why the tests
assert the resulting configuration rather than the registration: the
XmlRepository must be the EF one and the discriminator must be the
constant, plus a round-trip proving a value encrypted before a deploy is
readable after one. A test that only checked "Data Protection is
registered" would have passed in the broken case too.
Both modules previously called AddDataProtection() themselves. Module
registration runs after the host's, so those calls re-registered the
configuration chain and would have overridden the persistent store while
IDataProtector still resolved. They are removed, with a comment at each
site — the deletion otherwise looks like a regression. Each module's own
test project now guards against it being reintroduced.
ApplicationDbContext also migrates itself at startup. Deploy targets
offer no CLI, so migrations cannot be a manual step on the server.
Failures are classified rather than treated alike: a connection failure
means the database is not up yet, normal when the app and the database
start together after a reboot, and is retried with backoff; a migration
failure means something is broken and fails at once. Either way the
process does not start, which is what makes the liveness health check
trustworthy — an application that cannot reach its schema never answers
/health, so monitoring goes red instead of reporting a healthy instance
that cannot serve a request.
The cost of migrating without a human gate is that migrations must stay
forward-compatible and non-destructive, since rollback is "redeploy the
previous release". The new migration is purely additive.
Also wires this and the preceding hosting commit into both hosts, as
they touch the same lines of Program.cs.
Two constraints are enforced by documentation rather than code, and
belong in the deployment instructions: the key table must never be
pruned, and only one instance may migrate a given database at a time.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HHoJpxYXzHACSQguHrC5fw
Sluijsens
