v9.255.1 Caching Changes

[felddy]

This container supports Foundry VTT stable release 9.255

See:

• https://foundryvtt.com/releases/9.255

This release contains significant changes to the container's caching behavior.

How has caching changed?

Prior to this release container caching was disabled by default and could be enabled by setting CONTAINER_CACHE to a persistent path in the container.

As of this release container caching is enabled by default and points to /data/container_cache.

Why has caching changed?

There were reports of servers that are suspected to be instances of this container continuously downloading Foundry VTT releases non-stop. That is, a container would be stuck in a loop similar to this:

1. Download a Foundry VTT distribution which is currently weighing in at 185M.
2. Crashing due to some unknown cause.
3. Restarting due to an orchestration restart policy.
4. Repeat loop.

This was causing a significant load on the service that hosts the FoundryVTT releases.

What does this mean for my container?

• If you previously were setting CONTAINER_CACHE nothing will change. You server will operate as it did previously, storing cached distributions where you specified.
• If you were authenticating externally and providing the container a URL via the FOUNDRY_RELEASE_URL environment variable nothing will change.
• If you were not setting CONTAINER_CACHE, a new directory named container_cache will be created in your data volume and will contain zip files for each FoundryVTT release. They will be named like foundryvtt-9.255.zip. Your container will use these zip at startup instead of downloading one each time. When new versions are available they will be downloaded as usual. This can significantly speedup container startup time. See the Optional environment variables section of the README for more information.

If I want to disable caching how is that accomplished?

If you would like to disable this caching behavior you can set CONTAINER_CACHE to "" (an empty string). Please note that if you disable the container cache and are providing credentials to download distributions the exiting behavior of the container will be modified. Instead of exiting the container will sleep. This is to prevent a container from entering the aforementioned downloading loop. A sleeping container's status will be designated as unhealthy.

What's Changed

• Bump actions/cache from 2 to 3 by @dependabot in Bump actions/cache from 2 to 3 #300
• Update javascript dependencies and import changes by @felddy in Update javascript dependencies and import changes #302
• Fix linter bit rot detected in nightly builds by @felddy in Fix linter bit rot detected in nightly builds #305
• Improve release caching and prevent download loops by @felddy in Improve release caching and prevent download loops #307

Full Changelog: v9.255.0...v9.255.1

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This discussion was created from the release v9.255.1.