Remove the Postgres storage backend

[jdtw]

Why

The managed Postgres cluster has been destroyed and the service runs on SQLite, so PostgresStore is a code path that can no longer be reached — there is nothing left to connect to.

Keeping it wasn't neutral, either. Storage selection fell through to Postgres whenever SQLITE_PATH was unset, so a missing variable produced a confusing dial-and-fail at startup rather than naming the actual problem.

What

Removed: postgres.go, postgres_test.go, links.sql, docker_test.sh, local_test.sh, dev/psql.sh, sqlite_test.sh.

SQLITE_PATH is now required unless --ephemeral is passed, and the error says exactly that:

links: SQLITE_PATH environment variable must be set (or pass -ephemeral)

Dependencies: pgx/v5 plus pgpassfile, pgservicefile and puddle leave the module. modernc.org/sqlite becomes a direct requirement.

CI stops provisioning a database. No Postgres service container, no schema-seeding step, no DATABASE_URL — it was standing up a database purely to exercise code that no longer exists.

Three test wrappers collapse into one. test.sh now provisions its own SQLite file in its scratch directory, so the end-to-end suite needs no database server and cleans up after itself.

Dev stack drops its db service and keeps data in a named links_data volume.

Drive-by fix

dev/Dockerfile pinned golang:1.24-alpine while go.mod requires 1.25.0. Alpine images set GOTOOLCHAIN=local, so it can't self-upgrade:

go: go.mod requires go >= 1.25.0 (running go 1.24.13; GOTOOLCHAIN=local)

docker compose up — the quickstart the README points at — has been failing to build since the Go bump. This is pre-existing and unrelated to the Postgres removal, but it surfaced while verifying the dev environment and it would have been dishonest to document a quickstart I'd just watched fail. Bumped to match the production Dockerfile.

Testing

• go build, go vet, gofmt, go test ./... all clean
• ./test.sh passes end to end with no database server, leaving no scratch directory behind
• Startup paths checked directly: missing SQLITE_PATH gives the fatal above; --ephemeral starts in-memory
• Dev stack stood up for real (docker compose up --build): server opens SQLite, a link added through the dev client redirects correctly, web frontend returns 200
• Both documented dev behaviors verified: data survives restart, and down -v wipes it

Tradeoff

SQLite pins the app to a single machine in a single region with no replication. That's already how it runs, and it suits the workload — but horizontal scaling would mean reintroducing a networked database rather than reviving this one. It stays in git history.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code