Startup race condition: awx-task may start before awx-ee populates /etc/receptor/receptor.conf

[Vergiley]

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Bug Summary

Description
When deploying AWX using awx-operator on Kubernetes, we sometimes observe a startup race condition during cold pod starts.
In some cases, the awx-server-task container starts before the awx-server-ee container has created /etc/receptor/receptor.conf.
This results in a transient failure in awx-server-task with the following error:
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/receptor/receptor.conf'

Root Cause
The awx-ee container entrypoint populates the runtime config:
if [ ! -f /etc/receptor/receptor.conf ]; then cp /etc/receptor/receptor-default.conf /etc/receptor/receptor.conf sed -i "s/HOSTNAME/$HOSTNAME/g" /etc/receptor/receptor.conf fi exec receptor --config /etc/receptor/receptor.conf
Because Kubernetes does not guarantee startup order for regular containers, awx-server-task may execute awx-manage provision_instance before awx-server-ee has copied the receptor configuration into the shared EmptyDir volume.

Impact
The error typically happens once during cold startup.
The pod usually recovers automatically after a restart.

Expected Behavior
awx-server-task should not attempt to read /etc/receptor/receptor.conf until the file is guaranteed to exist.

AWX Operator version

2.19.1

AWX version

24.1.0

Kubernetes platform

kubernetes

Kubernetes/Platform version

v1.32.5

Modifications

yes

Steps to reproduce

1. Deploy AWX via awx-operator on Kubernetes.
2. Trigger pod recreation.
3. Occasionally observe FileNotFoundError: /etc/receptor/receptor.conf missing during awx-task startup.

Expected results

awx-task should wait until receptor.conf exists or handle missing config gracefully.

Actual results

During pod startup, awx-server-task fails with:

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/receptor/receptor.conf'

Additional information

We are using a customized awx-ee image with many additional modules installed.
The resulting image size is ~2GB.

This increases image pull time on cold starts and may make the startup race condition.

Operator Logs

No response