Files
LocalAI/core/http
Ettore Di Giacinto 1cf847f29e feat(distributed): stop workers listening, and stop them advertising
A worker now opens no listener on a routable interface and states no endpoint at
registration. Backend processes and the file-transfer server bind loopback, and
the frontend reaches both through the tunnel the worker dials. The bind address
is built from loopbackHost, the same constant the tunnel's grpc tag dials, so
"the worker binds where its tunnel dials" is one fact in one place rather than
two literals that can drift.

All three advertisement sites are closed, not one: the registration body,
RegisterNodeRequest, and the per-backend address in the install reply.

That third one was hiding a live bug. stopModelExact refuses a stop whose
ExpectedAddress does not match what the worker recorded for the process. The
worker recorded 127.0.0.1:port; handleBackendInstall reported advertiseHost:port;
the router stored the reported one and sent it straight back. On any worker whose
advertise host was not 127.0.0.1, every acknowledged model stop failed with an
address mismatch. Nothing caught it because the e2e harness set
LOCALAI_ADVERTISE_ADDR=127.0.0.1, which made the rewrite a no-op. Removing the
rewrite makes the two strings the same by construction.

The brief was wrong about two of the four functions it called dead.
effectiveBasePort is the base of the backend port allocator and resolveHTTPAddr
is the file server's bind address; deleting them would have deleted the port
allocator and the file server. Only the two advertise* helpers were dead, and
addr_test.go is rewritten rather than deleted, because the port arithmetic it
pinned still needs pinning.

NodeModel.Address survives with a narrowed meaning and is renamed
WorkerLocalAddress, along with the install reply field that feeds it. The
frontend still has to say WHICH backend process on a worker it means, and the
port in this string is how it says it: it travels as a stream target and the
worker dials its own loopback. The gorm column and the json key stay "address",
so neither a migration nor an API break rides along. Every fall-back to the
node's address is gone. installBackendOnNode now errors when a worker reports
success without naming one, because substituting the now-always-empty node
address would name an empty target, and the worker refuses that as an invalid
stream, which is classified as the worker answering about its backend. That is
the "a present worker reads as something it is not" class this phase forbids.

DistributedModelStore.Range had the same shape and was already wrong: it built
each remote model's client from the node's base gRPC port, never the port a
backend process listens on, so Free and Status went to the wrong place. It uses
the replica's address now.

BackendNode.Address and HTTPAddress are kept but made provably inert: no writer,
no reader that acts on them, and Register force-clears both on re-registration so
an upgraded worker's stale advertisement does not outlive its own upgrade in the
API and the Nodes page. Dropping the columns is a ~90-site edit across the specs,
the e2e suite, the MCP dto and the UI; it is recorded as a follow-up rather than
folded in here.

A persistent tunnel 401 still does not trigger re-registration, and now for a
reason rather than a deferral. Register CLEARS the node's replica rows, so
re-registering on a 401 would delete a live worker's rows on every retry, and
under the name collision that causes the 401 the two workers would take turns
doing it forever: a credential failure causing model reclamation. It also cannot
fix the named cause, since a collision is indistinguishable from a restart. The
401 log now names both causes and says nothing can reach this worker, which is
true only now that it has no listener.

The container healthcheck did not break the way the brief expected, since the
listener still exists on loopback and the probe runs inside the container. It did
have a real #10987 defect that this change makes the common case: it read
LOCALAI_SERVE_ADDR only, while effectiveBasePort reads LOCALAI_ADDR first, so a
worker on a non-default base port was probed on 50050 and reported unhealthy
while working. It follows the same precedence now.

Docs, the compose file and the e2e harness are updated in step: no inbound rule
or published port is needed for a worker, the two advertise variables are gone,
the remaining address variables are read for their port only, the
firewall-the-file-transfer-port warning is narrowed to the LOCALAI_HTTP_ADDR
opt-out, and the upgrade-order note no longer claims the worker still listens.
The Nodes page showed node.address, which is now always blank, so it shows the
node id instead.

Eight mutations, all red on a named spec, including reverting the loopback bind,
re-adding the address to the registration body, restoring both node-address
fall-backs, dropping the force-clear, storing the endpoint's address again, and
un-fixing the healthcheck. One of them caught a defect in a spec I had just
written: it asserted 200 where the endpoint returns 201, which went unnoticed
because core/http/endpoints/localai is not on the task's verify list. It is run
here.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-09-01 18:47:37 +00:00
..
2026-03-30 00:47:27 +02:00