Logan CusanoandClaude Sonnet 5
f91d4559f3
cat file 2>/dev/null || echo latest only falls back when cat itself fails
(nonzero exit, i.e. the file is missing) -- a file that EXISTS but is EMPTY
makes cat succeed with empty output, so PREV_TAG became "" instead of
"latest". That "" failed the emptiness check further down and exited 1 --
AFTER git pull + docker compose up -d had already succeeded. Worse: exiting
there skips the Health check step (Gitea Actions doesn't run later steps
after a failure), and Health check is the ONLY step that ever writes a real
value to .last_good_tag. Self-perpetuating: once the file went empty, every
future deploy failed the same way forever, with the app itself deploying
fine underneath it every time (confirmed against run 611: deploy log shows
all three images pulled/recreated/started at 66bbf5b, and /health
self-reports that exact GIT_SHA, baked into the image at build time --
two independent signals, same commit).
${VAR:-default} covers empty and unset in one expansion, matching the
fallback behavior the surrounding comment already documented as intended.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>