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Tricks

A Trick runs a task and finishes. Same shape as a Playground (Compose, services, logs, terminal) but Fibe treats it as one-shot: one replica per service, no restart on exit, exit code of the watched service decides success.

Use Tricks for work that should finish: tests, migrations, backups, scheduled jobs, CI.

Good for​

  • Test suites, lint checks.
  • Migrations, schema setup.
  • Backups, exports.
  • Data syncs, cleanups, doc builds.
  • Cron jobs.
  • CI on push or PR.

Not for​

  • Web apps that stay reachable.
  • Background workers that loop.
  • Hot-reload dev servers.
  • Anything that watches and never exits.

If the task should finish → Trick. If it should stay up → Playground.

How a Trick decides success​

Mark one service as the watched service with fibe.gg/job_watch: "true". Its exit defines the result. Zero = success. Non-zero = failure.

Supporting services (databases, caches, queues) start alongside. When the watched service exits, Fibe stops them.

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:17
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: $$var__DB_PASSWORD
  test:
    image: node:20
    working_dir: /app
    labels:
      fibe.gg/repo_url: https://github.com/owner/repo
      fibe.gg/source_mount: /app
      fibe.gg/start_command: npm test
      fibe.gg/job_watch: "true"   # ← Trick succeeds/fails based on this
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy

x-fibe.gg:
  metadata:
    job_mode: true                # ← marks the template as a Trick
    description: "Run the test suite against Postgres"
    category: "CI"

What Fibe Applies​

Fibe applies one-shot rules. You don't write these:

  • Every service set to one replica.
  • Every service set to restart: no.
  • Fibe labels stripped from the final compose at compile time.
  • fibe.gg/expose is forbidden — a Trick isn't there to serve traffic.

What you write:

  • A service that actually exits when done. No idle loops, no sleep infinity.
  • The watched-service marker on the one whose exit decides the outcome.

Plain Compose locally​

A Trick is a Docker Compose file with Fibe additions on top. docker compose up runs the same file locally for debugging. The only Fibe-specific piece is the watched-service marker.

Schedules & triggers​

ModeSettingsUse for
Manual(none)Click to run.
Scheduledschedule_config — cron expression + target Marquee.Daily backups, hourly syncs, weekly reports.
Triggeredtrigger_config — event (push or pull_request), repo, branch, Prop.CI on every push, PR test runs.

Combine both. A Trick can be scheduled and triggered — each event fires its own run.

See Authoring → Execution modes, mode-schedule-cron, mode-trigger-vcs.

Job ENV — credentials for Trick runs​

Tricks often need credentials the launcher shouldn't supply each time — deploy tokens, API keys, backup passwords.

Store them as Job ENV entries. Two scopes:

  • Global Job ENV — available to every Trick.
  • Prop-scoped Job ENV — applies only when the Trick is tied to that repository.

Prefer Job ENV over template variables when a credential is reused across many runs. See Security → Secret Vault & Job ENV.

Example: nightly backup​

Scheduled Trick that dumps a database at 03:00 UTC:

services:
  backup:
    image: my-org/backup-tool:1.4
    environment:
      DB_URL: $$var__DB_URL
      S3_BUCKET: backups.example.com
      AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: $$var__AWS_KEY      # Job ENV
      AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: $$var__AWS_SECRET # Job ENV
    command: ["./backup-now.sh"]
    labels:
      fibe.gg/job_watch: "true"

x-fibe.gg:
  variables:
    DB_URL: {name: "Database URL", required: true}
    AWS_KEY: {name: "AWS key", required: true, secret: true}
    AWS_SECRET: {name: "AWS secret", required: true, secret: true}
  metadata:
    job_mode: true
    description: "Nightly database backup to S3"
    category: "Operations"
    schedule_config:
      enabled: true
      cron: "0 3 * * *"
      marquee_id: 1

AWS_KEY and AWS_SECRET come from Job ENV at launch time.

FAQ​

Trick takes longer than its schedule period?

Overlapping runs result. Make the period longer than the max job time, or guard with a lock inside the job, or use a single-replica external queue. Fibe doesn't deduplicate scheduled runs.

Multiple branches on one Trick?

No wildcards. One Trick per branch. Explicit configuration is clearer than wildcard surprises.

push vs pull_request?
  • push — fires when the named branch receives a commit.
  • pull_request — fires when a PR is opened or updated targeting the branch. Code under test is the PR head.
Genie to debug a Trick?

Yes. Open a Genie chat against the Trick's logs. The Trick itself runs on its own — a Genie isn't part of the watched service.

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