Smoke-testing the first deploy uncovered three default-config issues
that no amount of Quadlet tuning would have caught:
1. DIALECTIC subsystem ignored DERIVER_MODEL_CONFIG__*. Honcho splits
dialectic into five reasoning levels (minimal/low/medium/high/max)
each with its own MODEL_CONFIG that defaults to OpenAI. Without
overrides, every /chat call fails with: ValidationException:
Missing API key for openai model config. Now setting all five
DIALECTIC_LEVELS__<level>__MODEL_CONFIG__* env vars to anthropic.
2. DERIVER batches representation tasks until a token threshold is
reached. For low-volume homelab use (one chatty operator), tasks
can sit unprocessed forever. Add DERIVER_FLUSH_ENABLED knob,
default true.
3. Embeddings default to OpenAI text-embedding-3-small. Anthropic
has no embedding API, so without an OpenAI key the embed step
fails the entire derivation. Default EMBED_MESSAGES=false until
a separate embedding provider is wired up (OpenAI for embeds-only
or a local BGE endpoint on astro-orbiter).
defaults/main.yml documents all three issues and the migration path
back to embeddings when ready.
src/deriver/deriver.py is a helpers module with no __main__ guard —
running it directly loads it and exits cleanly in ~3s with no logs,
which is what we were seeing. The actual queue-processor entry point
is src/deriver/__main__.py (asyncio.run(run_deriver())), invoked via
"python -m src.deriver".
Discovered during honcho first-deploy on lincoln: deriver container
crash-looped (in the sense that systemd restarted it constantly) but
the underlying process was actually exiting 0 on completion of the
empty helpers module.
The deriver script does "from src import crud" at the top, which only
works when the cwd / sys.path[0] is /app. Running the script by file
path (python /app/src/deriver/deriver.py) puts /app/src/deriver on
sys.path instead, and the import fails with ModuleNotFoundError.
Switch to python -m src.deriver.deriver and explicitly set
WorkingDir=/app so module resolution is deterministic across Podman
versions.
Discovered during the first deploy of the honcho role on lincoln —
honcho-api was healthy on :8000 but the deriver crash-looped 26 times
in two minutes.
Deploys Honcho (plastic-labs/honcho) as a rootful Podman + Quadlet
service on the lincoln VM (10.1.71.132). Three containers on a
user-defined network:
- honcho-postgres pgvector/pgvector:pg16
- honcho-api FastAPI on :8000
- honcho-deriver background worker for theory-of-mind derivations
LLM provider: Anthropic Claude (claude-sonnet-4-5). Switching providers
is two env-var changes — see README.
Traefik route hall-of-presidents.local.mk-labs.cloud -> lincoln:8000
added under boilerplates/traefik/dynamic/. JARVIS itself talks to
Honcho directly at lincoln:8000 (east-west); the Traefik alias exists
only for browser access to the Swagger /docs UI.
Requires three new vault entries before first run:
- vault_honcho_database_password
- vault_honcho_jwt_secret
- vault_honcho_anthropic_api_key
