---
status: graduated
initiated: 2026-08-22
touches: [03-DESIGN/00-as-is/04-delivery.md, 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md]
became: [03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md, 02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md]
---

# 002 — A mesh that runs locally

- **Initiated by:** jochen, 2026-08-22
- **Areas touched:** `install.d/`, `hal/meshware`, `hal/coordinator`, `hal/brain`,
  `hal/developer` (`dev_up`), `hal/sdk` (env generation, feature handlers, artifact
  manager), `test/pipeline/`, `test/dev-mesh/`, the provisioning path in
  `modules/postgres/`.

## Summary

Phase 0 of [`03-DESIGN/00-work-breakdown.md`](../../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/00-work-breakdown.md) requires
a mesh that comes up in containers, runs its own pipeline, and reproduces known faults on
demand. Nothing else in the decomposition starts until it exists, because every fault the
decomposition addresses was found in production — there was nowhere else to find it.

This effort establishes what already runs in a container, what is welded to the host, and
what it would take to close the gap. It does **not** choose an approach: the central
question — how a containerised node executes a module service, when a module service is
defined today as a systemd unit shelling to `docker compose` in `/services/` — is not
answered by ADR 0015 and is recorded below rather than decided.

## What was established

- The two existing container harnesses are **neither of them a mesh**, and one of them has
  not been able to build since 2026-06-04.
- Node identity is already portable — a single environment variable, no host handshake.
- Four concrete host couplings block a containerised node, all with known locations.
- All three Phase 0 fixtures are reproducible; one of them is documented in the knowledge
  base with an open root cause and is the cheapest place to start.

Detail and evidence in [`analysis.md`](analysis.md).

## Questions — all settled 2026-08-22

**Phase 0 is a development environment**, not a fixture rig — it is what the host-borrowing
dev tooling becomes.

**The trigger is a real source-forge container**, because the webhook relay is part of what
is under test.

**A node is a system container**, promotable to a virtual machine per node. This answered
the question the effort was stuck on, and dissolved it rather than solving it: against a
real node with a real init, the four host couplings catalogued in `analysis.md` §3 are not
couplings — they are how a node works. They were obstacles only to a node modelled as an
application container.

Consequently [`003-service-supervision`](../003-service-supervision/) **no longer blocks
Phase 0**. It remains a live architecture question, on its own timeline.

The remaining questions in `analysis.md` — what replaces host paths in a container, and how
faithful the lab must be — are answered in the design: nothing replaces them, because the
paths are real; and the divergences are enumerated rather than discovered.