Worker Box

Overview

The Worker Box is the existing Hetzner CPX22 (€15/month) — no new server needed. It handles workloads unsuitable for Cloudflare Workers/Pages, managed via Dokploy (already installed):

• CPU-intensive tasks (OpenImmo XML parsing, 50 MB ZIP)
• Long-running operations (floorplan OCR, PDF generation with puppeteer)
• Scheduled jobs (pg_dump backup, TLS certificate status check)
• Direct PostgreSQL access (Wire protocol via pg pool)

Cloudflare Images handles routine image resizing, WebP/AVIF conversion, and thumbnail generation on-the-fly. Only floorplan OCR, labeling, and PDF generation require the CPX22.

Why a Separate Worker Box?

Cloudflare Workers have these limitations that make them unsuitable for all workloads:

Limitation	Worker Box Solution
30s CPU time limit per invocation	No time limit on VPS
No filesystem writes (tmpfs only)	Full filesystem access
No node:child_process	Can run shell commands
No native PostgreSQL wire protocol	Full pg pool access
Memory limits (128MB–1GB)	4GB+ RAM available

Job Queue

The Worker Box polls a jobs table in PostgreSQL for queued work:

jobs {
  id: uuid PK
  organization_id, project_id
  type: 'openimmo.import' | 'image.label' | 'ecb.refresh' | ...
  status: 'queued' | 'running' | 'done' | 'failed'
  payload, result: jsonb
  attempts: int
}

Job Types

Job Type	Description	Worker Box Action
openimmo.import	Parse OpenImmo XML ZIP	Extract XML, parse units, insert/update DB, process images
image.label	Auto-classify unit images	Apply filename heuristics + optional Vision API
ecb.refresh	Fetch ECB reference rates	HTTP fetch ECB SDW API, update portal_settings

Deployment

The Worker Box runs as a Docker Compose stack managed by Dokploy (already running on the CPX22). Dokploy handles:

• Dockerfile-based builds from GitHub
• Environment variables managed in UI
• Logs for the worker container
• Restart policy (container keeps running after reboot)

It uses:

• pg pool for direct database access (not Neon HTTP)
• AWS SDK S3 for R2 operations
• node:crypto for hashing and validation