jitsucom/rotor does not start without the ClickHouse envs

[Ogoyukin]

Summary

jitsucom/rotor fails to start in self-hosted deployments if ClickHouse environment variables are not defined, even when ClickHouse is not intended to be used.

When jitsu-clickhouse-secret is removed (or CLICKHOUSE_HOST / CLICKHOUSE_URL are not set), the rotor pod goes into CrashLoopBackOff with:

[32m2026-02-24 06:42:12.539Z INFO  [kafka-rotor]: Subscribing to kafka topics:  ["destination-messages"]�[0m
�[31m2026-02-24 06:42:12.574Z ERROR [rotor]: Failed to start rotor processing �[0m
�[31m Error: env CLICKHOUSE_HOST is not defined�[0m
�[31m     at toError (/app/main.js:385414:12)�[0m
�[31m     at requireDefined (/app/main.js:385440:11)�[0m
�[31m     at clickhouseHost (/app/main.js:388887:90)�[0m
�[31m     at createMetrics (/app/main.js:388570:10)�[0m
�[31m     at _callee8$ (/app/main.js:406384:25)�[0m
�[31m     at /app/main.js:406198:1001�[0m
�[31m     at Generator.<anonymous> (/app/main.js:406204:1670)�[0m
�[31m     at Generator.next (/app/main.js:406205:377)�[0m
�[31m     at rotor_asyncGeneratorStep (/app/main.js:406215:76)�[0m
�[31m     at _next (/app/main.js:406216:168)�[0m
�[32m2026-02-24 06:42:12.575Z INFO  [kafka-rotor]: Closing kafka-rotor �[0m
�[32m2026-02-24 06:42:12.576Z INFO  [kafka-rotor]: Kafka-rotor closed gracefully. 💜 �[0m
�[32m2026-02-24 06:42:12.576Z INFO  [rotor]: Process exited with code 1 �[0m

From the code analysis, the reason appears to be unconditional ClickHouse initialization inside createMetrics() during service startup.

Although event logging already supports a fallback (DummyEventsStore) when ClickHouse is not configured, metrics initialization still requires ClickHouse configuration and fails early. This makes ClickHouse effectively mandatory for rotor startup.

For self-hosted environments, this creates an unexpected hard dependency on ClickHouse.

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System configuration and versions

• Jitsu Next (newjitsu)
• Deployment type: self-hosted (Kubernetes)
• Image: jitsucom/rotor:<tag>
• ClickHouse disabled (no jitsu-clickhouse-secret, no CLICKHOUSE_HOST / CLICKHOUSE_URL)

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Artifacts (logs, etc)

Rotor container logs:

CLICKHOUSE_HOST is not defined

Pod status:

CrashLoopBackOff

Reproduction steps:

1. Deploy Jitsu self-hosted
2. Remove jitsu-clickhouse-secret (or unset CLICKHOUSE_HOST)
3. Restart rotor
4. Rotor fails during startup