Life Towers

A personal productivity tool for organising tasks into visual "towers" of blocks, grouped on pages. Each user is identified by a client-generated token — no accounts, no passwords.

Architecture

The application runs as a single Docker container. A FastAPI process serves both the Angular SPA (as static files) and the JSON API on port 8000. Data is stored in a SQLite database file persisted via a volume mount at /data. There is no separate database server required.

The container is designed to run behind a reverse proxy (nginx, Caddy, Traefik). It honors X-Forwarded-For, X-Forwarded-Proto, and X-Forwarded-Host so rate limiting and logging see the real client IP, and links built with request.url produce the correct scheme.

Quick start

# Local build (uses docker-compose.dev.yml which builds from source and
# wipes data on `down -v`):
docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up --build -d

Then visit http://localhost:8000.

For a production-style run, set LIFE_TOWERS_IMAGE to point at your registry tag and use the default docker-compose.yml:

LIFE_TOWERS_IMAGE=registry.example.com/life-towers:latest \
  docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Description
`LIFE_TOWERS_IMAGE`	`life-towers:local`	The image `docker-compose.yml` will run. Point at your registry tag for production deploys.
`LIFE_TOWERS_PORT`	`8000`	Host port mapped to the container.
`LIFE_TOWERS_PULL_POLICY`	`missing`	`pull_policy` passed to compose. Set `always` to force-pull on `up`.
`LIFE_TOWERS_ALLOWED_ORIGIN`	(empty)	If set, restricts CORS to this origin. Leave empty for same-origin mode (the typical setup behind nginx).
`LIFE_TOWERS_FORWARDED_ALLOW_IPS`	`*`	(Optional, advanced.) Override uvicorn's `--forwarded-allow-ips` if you want to narrow the set of trusted proxies.

Data persistence

SQLite data is stored at /data/life-towers.db inside the container, persisted via the life-towers-data Docker named volume. Back up with:

docker compose exec life-towers sqlite3 /data/life-towers.db .dump > backup.sql

To switch to a host bind mount for easier file-level backups, see the commented line in docker-compose.yml.

Behind nginx

Sample reverse-proxy snippet:

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    server_name towers.example.com;

    # SSL config omitted

    client_max_body_size 4m;     # backend enforces 2 MiB; give a small margin

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Host              $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP         $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For   $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host  $host;
    }
}

Development without Docker

Backend: cd backend && uv run uvicorn life_towers.main:app --reload
Frontend: cd frontend && npm start — runs ng serve on :4200 with /api/* proxied to the backend on :8000 (see frontend/proxy.conf.json).

End-to-end tests

A docker-compose.dev.yml builds a single-container stack with an ephemeral volume — ideal for Playwright runs:

docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up --build -d
cd frontend && npm run test:e2e          # http://localhost:8000
docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml down -v

PLAYWRIGHT_BASE_URL overrides the target (e.g. http://life-towers:8000 when Playwright itself runs in a container on the same docker network).

Deployment

Forgejo CI (.forgejo/workflows/ci.yml) builds and tests the backend, frontend, and Docker image on every push to master. On successful push to master it also tags and pushes the image to a registry — configure REGISTRY_URL, REGISTRY_USER, and REGISTRY_PASSWORD as repository secrets.

The deploy workflow (.forgejo/workflows/deploy.yml) triggers on workflow_dispatch or a v* tag push. It SSHs into the target server and runs docker compose pull && docker compose up -d, then polls the healthcheck. The server must have a .env file alongside docker-compose.yml that pins LIFE_TOWERS_IMAGE to the registry tag pushed by CI — otherwise docker compose pull is a no-op against the placeholder life-towers:local. Configure DEPLOY_HOST, DEPLOY_USER, DEPLOY_SSH_KEY, and DEPLOY_PATH as repository secrets before use.

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