OK I MADE PROGRESS ON MY POKING AROUND WITH NICOLIUM. Pulling the zip provided and working with that, at least locally, without Docker, seems to pass through the appropriate nicolium.json file, which I can tell because I see the little copyright footer changed from "meow :3" to "beep boop", and the colors are slightly different.
Now to work with it thisaway now, see if it makes progress. So long that I can successfully ADD <zip link> in the Dockerfile and it ends up in the directory I want, i should be able to produce a competent build image to then copy files over to a runtime caddy image.
ok we're finally in the proper WORKDIR now. just doing things step by step at this point, making sure everything is in its place before I add the next couple of lines (really just uncommenting the next couple of lines, i know what needs to be done its just making sure paths are right)
ok it's just. something up with docker, or at least the caddy docker image. running this shit on fedora is fine, but trying to move stuff into the caddy-alpine image breaks.
...do i dare build everything from absolute scratch and host it in a debian trixie container. what the fuck else can explain this. is there a non-alpine based caddy image that isn't the windows server versions?
cause everything is mapped through AS IT SHOULD based on my understanding of things, like. it surely has to be something with how stuff is handled in the caddy-alpine image, because i can run it just fine directly from my fedora laptop using the build-in caddy package and the basic pnpm build.
like sure i can just build this manually and call it a day on my container, but i really want to try and have this be fully reproducible with a custom nicolium.json file, something my current instance lacks.
ok I've identified the exact problem. When building with env variable BACKEND_URL, it seems to default to the standard nicolium.json file... UNTIL you log in. Once you log-in, the custom defined nicolium.json file takes over. That's... weird to me, I imagine that's either a bug or just a quirk of how it works currently. Going to draft up a proper issue to send in when it's not 4am (oops).
at least I've established consistent behavior now, though. it's also ONLY with that env variable. Using anything else seems to work as expected, it's just when setting BACKEND_URL to anything. So... I do have an actually reproducible build, it's just that there's one specific quirk that makes it a bit more annoying to use as a standalone FE for a specific arbitrary instance, like my own rn.
@senil is there anything i can help with? i think i mostly used it with pleroma/akkoma where you can provide the config server-side instead of a static nicolium.json file so the fallback behavior might not be optimal
@mkljczk I'll draft up a formal issue when it's not 4:30am, it seems like there's something with how BACKEND_URL is handled at build time in standalone with the static nicolium.json. I've checked other ENV's and they show the custom look before login, it's only when I define BACKEND_URL.
I've checked with building outside of docker, multiple times inside docker with lightly tweaked (just changing the copyright text from default) as well as more customized structures, it's only whenever I build with that and serving as a static site pointing to a GoToSocial instance that it breaks. Might poke into if it's a matter of what kind of instance it points to (shouldn't impact things?) or if its consistent no matter what (what i expect).
Did just realize I didn't test a build where I set both BACKEND_URL and WITH_LANDING_PAGE, going to see if and how that impacts things. I expect BACKEND_URL's quirk to take precedence over WITH_LANDING_PAGE's behavior from a pure visual/color/etc. standpoint. Gonna build that image now, won't be too long.
(i have like, eight "nicolium-fe:alpha.X" docker containers to help me check things fast lol, if it works it works though)
@mkljczk yeah as I expected, using BACKEND_URL overrides any settings in nicolium.json for color, copyright flag, even sidebar links. Unfamiliar with anything node or vite or whatever beyond "build thing pls" so I can't really dig into it, but at least there's a clear-enough flag causing problems.
ninja edit: I did expect BACKEND_URL to remove any mention of the landing page HTML, was just curious of there was any other noticeable alterations or if somehow it preserved any setting, but nope. setting BACKEND_URL seems to ignore any user-defined nicolium.json file until log-in. once I log in with anything (like my now-dead markov chain bot) it pulls up the .json.
edit again: realized I should probably mention that these builds are using the develop.zip archive from git.pleroma.social. was having issues trying to pull the git repo via dockerfile ADD or manually cloning it inside the build image. i presume those roughly follow commit release cadence but not 100% positive, git is also mostly a mystery to me (for now)
