feat: run the Hasura database on pgvector and add semantic search

[mosoriob]

Problem

Every hasura migrate apply fails. Migration 1771200021000_standard_variable_embeddings runs CREATE EXTENSION vector. The chart pins the Hasura database to postgis/postgis:10-3.2-alpine, which ships no pgvector.

could not open extension control file "/usr/local/share/postgresql/extension/vector.control"

The pgvector work in mintproject/monorepo changed compose.yaml and the Tapis Pods deployment. It did not change this chart.

Changes

File	Change
values.yaml	components.hasura_db.image -> ghcr.io/mintproject/postgres-pgvector:develop
values.yaml	new components.semantic_search block
templates/semantic-search.yaml	new Deployment and Service on port 8091
templates/hasura.yaml	always set SVO_SEMANTIC_SEARCH_WEBHOOK_URL
Chart.yaml	9.0.0-beta.12 -> 9.0.0-beta.13

Breaking change: a data migration is required

The new image is PostgreSQL 16. The old default was PostgreSQL 10. PostgreSQL 16 refuses to start on PostgreSQL 10 data files. A helm upgrade alone leaves the database pod in CrashLoopBackOff.

Each deployment must run these steps:

1. Scale the Hasura deployment to 0.
2. Dump the database with a PostgreSQL 16 pg_dump.
3. Delete the PVC data-<release>-hasura-db-0.
4. Upgrade, then restore with pg_restore.

The PVC carries helm.sh/resource-policy: keep, so Helm never deletes it for you.

Why the webhook variable is always set

The metadata in mintproject/monorepo declares nine event triggers with webhook_from_env: SVO_SEMANTIC_SEARCH_WEBHOOK_URL. Hasura rejects the whole metadata apply when the variable is absent. Setting it unconditionally keeps metadata apply working even when an operator disables the service. Override it with components.semantic_search.environment.webhook_url.

Verified

This was run on the shared MicroK8s dev cluster on 2026-09-12, by hand, in the order above.

Check	Result
Server	PostgreSQL 16.9
pgvector	0.8.6
Restore of the PostgreSQL 10 dump	complete; 599 standard variables, 76 tables
hasura migrate apply	5 pending migrations applied, now 31 total
GraphQL query	200
helm lint	passes
helm template with both ci/ values files and tapis.test.values.yaml	renders
helm template with semantic_search.enabled=false	renders; the variable is still set

Two limits reviewers must know

• ARM is not covered. mintproject/monorepo builds postgres-pgvector for linux/amd64 only. arm_image keeps imresamu/postgis-arm64:12-3.4-alpine, which has no pgvector. An ARM deployment still cannot apply the embedding migration.
• The image tag is develop. There is no released tag for this image yet. semantic-search falls back to global.imageTag; confirm that ghcr.io/mintproject/semantic-search publishes the tag your deployment pins.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_0162tbdGCuxbimJUmfCbz69q