A container may be marked `run-once: true` — a step the host runs to completion,
gating whatever the declaration places after it. The control plane's part is
small: the field is carried to the host unchanged (containers pass through as
maps), and the step keeps its author-order position ahead of the container it
gates, because the gate is declaration order, not a resolved dependency
(ADR 0005).
The manifest parser refuses a run-once that is not a boolean and the pair
run-once + restart-on (contradictory lifecycles) — near the manifest rather than
far away on the machine, the same lesson the action ban records. Three unit
tests; go build ./... and go test ./... green.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
A node says it is there every minute and describes what it applied rarely,
and both went through Heard, which wrote every one down as a report. So a
bare alive replaced the node's last real apply with an empty one -- clearing
the declaration digest `current` is measured against, the carried ports a
push assigns around, and the clean-or-failed outcome. A node that had just
caught up read as behind within the minute, and never converged.
Whether it converged in time was a race the node's own apply set: the link's
one loop applies a declaration to completion before it can send the pending
heartbeat, so a fast apply (catalogue-small) leaves the digest standing the
~60s until the next beat -- long enough for the lab to see `current` -- while
a heavy wave whose apply outran the first beat (mongodb + unifi + marrytts)
had the alive fire milliseconds after the report and never showed `current`
at all, timing out settle even at 1200s.
Heard now returns after moving last_seen for a report that carries no account
of what the machine did -- nothing applied, nothing refused, nothing failed,
which is exactly a bare alive. A real report always carries one. This is what
the commit that began hearing alives said it did and did not: "a bare word
that a node is there moves last_seen and touches nothing else."
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
04-ISSUES/036: the media stack is several modules that must share the
library and download directories on one machine, but the manifest could
only say "a directory I own". Six modules each declared the same paths as
their own resources, and the resolver's duplicate-owner refusal — right
in general — would refuse the stack's only sensible assignment the first
time two of them landed on one node.
Add an `accesses` field: a pre-existing, operator-owned path a module is
granted use of but does not own (novox/hq ADR 0051). Distinct from a
`directory` resource on every axis the host acts on — the mesh creates,
chowns and reconciles a directory; it mounts an access and owns nothing.
An access is not a resource, so it never enters the duplicate-owner map
and several modules may name one path with no conflict. What is refused
is the contradiction: a path one module owns and another accesses.
Rendered into the declaration as an `access` resource, before the
container that mounts it, so the host can find it present or refuse
clearly. Unit tests cover co-resolution (the exact 036 case), the
unchanged owner-vs-owner refusal, the owner-vs-accessor refusal, and
access validation.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
A module may declare a short `slug`; the mesh derives mesh_<node>_<slug|name> and
refuses at assignment (naming the slug as the remedy) when it would still overflow —
identityLimit is now 20, an S3 access key's, the tightest of the backends a login
reaches (04-ISSUES/010). The slug rides the grant so the provider derives the same
login the consumer does, even across nodes. CheckIdentity is now wired, in grantsFor.
Also, the minted secret shrinks to 40 chars (30 bytes) from 43: an S3 secret key is
8-40, the same fit-the-tightest-backend rule on the credential's other half.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
CreateModuleAccount now also grants serve.<module>.* (declare, bind, consume its
own tool queues) and mesh.rpc (bind them on, publish replies) — so a module can
serve its tools and reply, scoped to exactly its own, and no other module's. The
broker tests still hold a module out of another's queue.
listens.from was a manifest constant — one value for every node a module runs
on. Now a per-node setting overrides it: {"expose": {"5432": "anywhere"}} makes
postgres public on the machine it is set for while it stays from:mesh elsewhere,
and the firewall (ADR 0050) is computed from the effective source. Exposure()
validates it — a port the module does not listen on, or a source that is not
mesh/anywhere/machine, is refused rather than reaching nothing; UnusedSettings
knows 'expose' is a real destination. Tested: default mesh, setting opens it to
anywhere, bad settings refused.
LavinMQ refuses a non-administrator declaring a queue with a dead-letter
exchange, so a scoped module cannot make its own. EnsureModuleQueue declares
<node>.<module>.events with its DLX as the mesh, and 'module issue' does so
for a consuming module — the runtime then passively checks it rather than
declaring. Verified against a real broker: the scoped account binds and
consumes the pre-declared queue.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
'module issue <module> --node <m>' looks up the module's emits/consumes from
the catalogue, ensures the bus exchanges exist, creates its scoped account
(CreateModuleAccount), and seals an amqps {url,fingerprint} to the node as the
module's broker own-secret — the same delivery as 'builder issue', now generic.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
CreateModuleAccount gives an assigned module its own broker account whose
permissions ARE its manifest: declare and read its own <node>.<module>.events
queue, read the events exchange to bind onto if it consumes, write the events
exchange only if it emits. The account name carries the node (sealed per
machine), the permissions carry the module (one cannot read another's queue).
The builder becomes one instance of this rule rather than a separate kind.
EnsureEventExchanges declares the bus the substrate owns — mesh.events,
mesh.rpc, mesh.events.dead + a retention queue — idempotently, since a module
account may not declare an exchange.
Scope tested as patterns (no broker needed), and every management call verified
against a real LavinMQ. Honest limit recorded in the code: LavinMQ has no topic
permissions, so ADR 0047's emit-origin reservation (module.<self>.*) is stamped
by the sdk, not enforced by the broker; a pure consumer like the audit logger
is unaffected.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
A module declares the event types it emits and the patterns it consumes,
parallel to provides/requires (novox/hq ADR 0046). Events span module.*,
mesh.* and node.* sources; a consumes for an event nothing emits is a
dangling edge. Fields only here; the dangling-edge check and the runtime
wiring follow.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
Portainer mounts the container runtime's socket, and the catalogue's
mount gate refused it — rightly by its own lights, since nothing in the
manifest distinguishes a machine facility from the module's data. That
distinction is 04-ISSUES/026's open question, so the gate now carries
the one facility the catalogue mounts as a named exception beside the
citation, one line per facility, never a pattern.
Also the confession: the previous commit landed with this gate red,
because a pipeline's tail swallowed go test's exit code. The gate was
right and the process around it briefly was not.
Node-RED and Icecast are the plain shapes — a data directory owned by
the number inside, generated passwords in a host-written env file, one
declared port each.
Portainer mounts the container runtime's socket, which is the mount
04-ISSUES/026 is reopened about: a machine facility, not the module's
data, spelled today exactly like a data directory. It is converted as
it runs now rather than held hostage to that vocabulary — the same
mount the builder already carries — and it will be the second citation
when 026 gets its answer.
Letta stays unconverted for now: the arrangement being replaced pins a
year-old image of a fast-moving project, and converting a pin nobody
would keep is not fidelity. It wants a fresh look at what version to
run, which is a decision and not a translation.
All pinned by real digests, resolved on this workstation today.
The lab's diagnostics said it in one line: AUTH called without any
password configured for the default user. With an aclfile configured,
redis takes the default user from the file and quietly ignores
requirepass — so the empty seed this module shipped left the store
without any password at all, politely refusing the credential the mesh
had sealed for it.
And the file could never have worked here anyway: it was host-declared
content, which the host reconciles, so every re-apply would have wiped
what ACL SAVE wrote — a fight between two reconcilers with the tenants
as the ball.
So no file. requirepass alone does what it says, and durability moves
to the watch, which now checks the store and not only its inputs: a
restarted store comes back empty and is re-granted within a tick,
because reconciling is against reality, not against a diff of
instructions. A run that failed leaves last empty, so the next tick
retries instead of believing the inputs were handled.
The report carries the digest of the declaration it applied (mesh-host
8211d8b), and the mesh stores it beside the outcome. `reported` rows in
the status JSON now say `current`: whether the machine's last word
names the declaration last sent.
Not derivable from the timestamps beside it, which is why they were
not enough: an apply begun under the previous declaration reports
after the next send — newer, and still about the old words. The lab
lost exactly that race between one test's closing push and the next
test's opening one.
Empty digests — every host from before reports carried one — read as
not current, which errs toward waiting rather than toward asserting on
files that are not there yet.
The lab named both failures in one run: the store restarted forever on
a conf file it could not read, and the forge could not traverse into
the directory that held its files. Both are the same fault — a file the
mesh declares root-owned, consumed by a container process that dropped
to a uid the machine has never heard of.
The forge's data now belongs to 1000, the user its container runs as.
The store's conf, ACL file and data belong to 999, which is what redis
becomes after its entrypoint drops privileges. The package registry's
conf directory belongs to 10001, which writes htpasswd into it.
Made expressible by the host in the commit beside this one: an owner
may be numeric, because a container's user has no name on the machine.
The same shape as the four before them — a config directory of their
own, the shared library paths they actually touch, one owner and mode
across every sharer — which is the point of doing them together: five
manifests that differ only in name, port and which shelves they read
prove the shape is a shape and not a coincidence.
All pinned by real digests, resolved on this workstation today. The
catalogue stands at 27.
The shape they share is the interesting part: a media library is a fact
about the machine that several modules mount, so each declares exactly
the paths it touches, with one owner and mode across all of them. The
host reconciles a directory rather than creating it, so the second
module ensuring a path the first already ensured is maintenance, not a
fight — and ADR 0030 keeps a shared path alive when one of its sharers
is unassigned, because it holds what the mesh did not put there.
Plex runs on the machine's own network like home-assistant, and for the
same reason: discovery is the point. The other three publish, so the
mesh chooses their machine ports.
All pinned by real digests, resolved on this workstation today. The
catalogue stands at 22, of which the arrangement being replaced ran 95
— but its number counts workstation ricing and one-machine tooling
beside services, and only the services convert to manifests like these.
Nextcloud is the first consumer of two provisions at once: a database
from the mesh's postgres and primary storage in a bucket from the
mesh's own object store — which is how the arrangement being replaced
ran it, minus the bundled MariaDB it no longer needs. Every credential
in one env file the host writes; the manifest holds placeholders and
the mesh holds nothing readable.
Home automation runs on the machine's own network, because discovering
devices is the point and a bridge would hide them — so nothing is
published, the declared port is the bound port, and the rule set opens
exactly it. The case MachineSide was corrected for, in the catalogue.
Both pinned by real digests, resolved on this workstation today.
"Not waiting" says the declaration is current, not that the machine
finished applying it: the sent digest is recorded at send. So a test
that pushed, saw waiting clear, and asked the machine what it was
running found containers that did not exist yet — the certificate fix
made compositions stable, and the settling that used to fail first had
been hiding the gap behind it.
The mesh already held the missing half: every machine's last report,
with its time. It just was not in the JSON. `reported` now sets each
machine's last word beside when the current declaration went to it, and
"has it caught up" becomes a comparison of two timestamps the mesh
recorded itself — a report newer than the send means the machine acted
on what was sent; older means it is still working, which waiting alone
cannot distinguish.
Converted from the arrangement being replaced. The search engine brings
its own valkey on its own network — a sidecar is just a second
container resource. The time-series database initialises itself from
two generated secrets, and its data and config directories are declared
with the owner the image runs as. The package registry's configuration
is a declared file rather than a merged one, which is the position
16-module-coverage takes on config merging: the module knows its own
format because it wrote the rest of the file.
Two were read and deliberately not converted, which is worth recording
where the next person will look:
n8n builds a custom image, so it is a module with a repository rather
than a manifest in this catalogue — where a module's own code lives is
ADR 0037's question, and pretending otherwise here would prejudge it.
mosquitto authenticates from a hashed password file that only
mosquitto_passwd can write, and the mesh delivers plaintext sealed
files — so an honest conversion needs a small provisioner, the same
shape as the cache's. Without one, the manifest would compose a broker
nobody can log in to, which is exactly the kind of module that parses,
resolves, and stops on the machine.
All images pinned by real digests, resolved on this workstation today.
Converted from the arrangement being replaced, in its shapes rather
than theirs.
The registry is the manifest the lab already proved, promoted: names
its image by digest and is never built (04-ISSUES/029), provides the
artifact store, claims it once per machine.
Redis is the third provision after a database and a bucket, and the
first whose tenancy is a pattern in a shared keyspace rather than a
namespace something else enforces. Its provisioner mirrors the postgres
one's contract line for line — the manifest, the sealed per-consumer
files, the mark, the withdrawal of orphans — and speaks RESP directly:
five commands are needed, and a client library large enough to hide
them would be most of the program's size. A prefix Redis would read as
a pattern is refused, because the grant must mean what the manifest
said; grants are persisted with ACL SAVE, or said loudly, because a
cache that forgets its tenants on restart reports success until then.
Umami asks the mesh for its database and a generated app secret, and
carries no state of its own — the arrangement being replaced ran a
bundled second postgres beside it. Grafana keeps its dashboards in a
declared directory with the image's own owner. Both listen on 3000, as
does the forge — which is the mesh's port assignment earning its keep.
Traefik is deliberately not converted: the mesh's route provider is
mesh-route-proxy, which speaks route grants natively, and a traefik
that consumed them would be an adapter nobody has written pretending
to be a conversion.
All images pinned by real digests, resolved on this workstation today.
Every signing carries a fresh random serial, so a mesh that signed per
composition composed a different declaration every time it was asked
what a machine should be. Every machine carrying a certificate then
stood eternally "waiting" — pushed seconds ago and already behind — and
the forge test, the first to wait for settledness on such a machine,
failed four runs in a row wearing three other faults' clothes.
Found live on a kept mesh, which is what settled it: two plans seconds
apart, identical to the byte but for one serial, in the certificate
file. Deduction had four theories; the diff had one line.
The keeping columns had existed since the serving key's migration —
"and what was issued for it" — and were written by nothing, the same
shape ReleasePorts was found in this morning.
Kept beside the serving key it certifies, and it stands while the name,
the key and the clock agree: a node rejoining with a new key or renamed
gets a fresh signing, exactly as if nothing were kept, and so does one
whose certificate is into its last stretch of life. The port's rule and
the secret's, applied to the third thing composed fresh each time.
Three faults, one file split. All from reading, all verified to bite.
Unassign now releases the module's ports. ReleasePorts existed, said
"for when it is unassigned" in its own comment, and was called by
nothing — so a fixed port stayed claimed in the name of a module that
was gone, and the next module needing it was refused by a ghost.
Kept-once-chosen is a promise about a module that is still here.
MachineSide reads addressed mappings. "127.0.0.1:8080:80" was split at
the first colon, "127.0.0.1" failed to parse as a port, and the mapping
was silently skipped — putting the filter back on the declared port,
the exact fault the function was written to end. The machine side is
the second-from-last part, which is the reading the host already
applies, and the substrate bundle writes that shape today.
An allocation race answers in the mesh's words. Two concurrent picks of
the same port used to surface as a Postgres constraint violation,
verbatim. The table has two keys, so the collision is one of two facts:
the racer was this same assignment — then its answer is the answer,
kept-once-chosen does not care who chose — or another module took the
machine port, and an unfixed pick is simply made again against the
moved free list. A fixed port that lost the race is refused by name.
Told apart by re-reading the row, not by the constraint's name, so this
does not couple to the migration's spelling.
And the artifact-store cycle tests moved to bootstrap_cycle_test.go;
machineside_test.go had quietly become three subjects.
Confining allocation to the push path took `plan` with it, and `plan`
belongs on the other side: it is a person asking what a push would do to
one named machine, so the port it shows and the secret it seals must be
the ones a push would use. Both are kept once chosen, so showing
numbers a later push would replace answers a question nobody asked.
Caught by the lab: composing the real modules stopped producing
postgres's sealed superuser, because nothing had minted it and the
read-only path correctly declined to.
The line is not question versus command. It is a person asking once
about one machine, against the mesh asking continuously about all of
them — the second is what hung, and the second is what reads.
Refused where it is written: a module that provides `artifact-store` and
also builds artifacts asks the mesh to put an artifact into the thing
that artifact is needed to create. Building publishes to the store, and
the builder will not start without one — "a built artifact nobody can
fetch is not built".
This is the question the substrate record asks of every candidate: can
it grant itself the thing it provides? The store cannot create its own
database, the broker cannot create its own virtual host, and a registry
cannot grant itself a repository. The first two are why they are in the
bundle. This is the same sentence, unenforced.
So such a module names its image, exactly as the bundle names the three
a first node starts from. One that wants an interface or a tool server
beside it is a second module, mirrored the ordinary way once the first
is running — a real limit, and better said here than discovered on a
mesh new enough that nobody is watching it.
Refused at the manifest because the alternative is a build that never
returns.
The provision name is now a constant. A string compared in one place is
a convention; a string a rule turns on is a fact.
object-store.json and minio.json described the same thing: same image,
same provision at the same scope, same provisioner. Not two
implementations a person could choose between — one module written
twice. Assigning both to a node would have collided on `s3-bucket`.
It exists because it was written first, to pair with photos.json for the
README's worked edge, and minio.json was the fuller version of the same
module written later. Nobody removed the first.
The pair test keeps its point and now reads the surviving one. Checked
across the rest: this was the only duplicate.
`status` hung. It composes a declaration for every node to answer *is
this machine running what I would send it*, and composing one assigns
each module a machine port — so the question wrote to the database, and
wrote to the same rows as the machine it was asking about.
`port_assignment` is unique on (node, machine). Two transactions
inserting the same port do not race, they queue: the second waits on the
index until the first commits. A status polled every two seconds while a
node applies is two writers on those rows, and the poll stopped
returning rather than returning something wrong — which is the better
failure of the two, and still a failure.
The latent version of this was there before anything polled: two
compositions running at once could both allocate.
So allocation belongs to the send path alone. The mesh chooses a port
when it commits to sending one; every other caller reads what was
chosen. A module with nothing assigned has never been sent, which is
precisely what "waiting" means — the read needs no number to be right
about that, and inventing one would make the answer worse.
Named rather than passed as a bare bool: at three call sites, `true` and
`false` say nothing about which of these two things is meant.
Checked by the lab, which now polls status throughout an apply.
The rule was right about data and wrong about everything else. The
builder mounts the container runtime's socket, which is not its data,
does not belong to it, and must not be declared as one of its
directories — and the check refused the builder's own manifest.
Caught by the lab, though not honestly: the run was already going when
this went in, so the builder binary was rebuilt mid-run with the check
compiled into it and the failure was mine, not the mesh's. Confirmed
against the manifest directly rather than inferred from the log.
What it was protecting is real and stands — the fourteen mounts are all
declared. But enforcing it needs a way to tell "the directory my data
lives in" from "a machine facility I was granted", and the mesh has no
vocabulary for the second. `capabilities` is the closest thing and does
not name paths. That is a design decision, so it goes back to
04-ISSUES/026 rather than being invented here to make a check pass.
The check that every real manifest still parses is kept. It costs
nothing and it is how the next attempt at this finds out sooner.
Closes the half of 04-ISSUES/026 that would otherwise come back. The
fourteen mounts across the forge, the mail system, the store and the
object store are all declared now — but nothing said they had to be, so
they were right by coincidence and the next volume added would not be.
A bind mount whose source does not exist is created by the container
runtime, as root, with a mode it picks. So `owner` and `mode` — which
exist precisely so a module can say who its data belongs to — were
silently not applied to the only directories holding data.
And the rule written for exactly this case did not reach them. A
directory the mesh declared and no longer wants is kept, not removed,
when it holds anything the mesh did not put there (ADR 0030). That is
the answer to *what happens to my data when a module goes away*, and it
is written in terms of declared directories: an undeclared one sits
outside it, because the mesh does not know it is there.
Refused where it is written rather than on the machine, which cannot
tell the difference — by the time the host sees the mount it is being
asked to make a directory, which it is perfectly able to do. The fault
is in the manifest, so it is named at the manifest. Same argument as the
action refusal directly above it.
A path under a declared directory counts as declared, as do the files a
module already names: its own secrets, its grants, what it receives.
Every real manifest is checked to still parse, and the refusal bites.
The lab caught this: a module declaring a port and running no container
had its rule set opened on 20000 while its service sat on 9101. The
firewall reported success and blocked the thing it was told to admit,
which is the precise failure the filtering comment warns about, arrived
at from the other side.
Assignment was applied to every declared port. But a container's mapping
is the thing that translates, and where there is none the software binds
what it binds — the mesh choosing a number does not move the service, it
only makes the mesh wrong about where it is.
The declaration side already knew this: publishedOn rewrites container
ports and nothing else. Filtering did not, so the two disagreed about
the same fact. MachineSide is now the one derivation both follow.
It also fixes a second case nobody had hit yet: a mapping the manifest
wrote itself, like the mail system's 7080:80. That is passed through
untouched when composing, so assigning it a machine port would have
opened a rule on a port the container does not publish. Either side of
such a mapping now names it, and the host side is the answer — a module
may read `listens` as what its software binds or as what the machine
exposes, and both readings want the same number.
Recorded either way, assigned or not: the map means where this module's
port is on this machine, and every reader needs that answer regardless
of who chose it.
Tests bite — making it always assignable reproduces the lab failure.
The other half of ADR 0038, and what 04-ISSUES/028 was actually about.
A module can now avoid colliding with another module; until this it
could not avoid colliding with the mesh itself.
The substrate is not a module. A node raises it from the bundle it
carries before any mesh exists, so the control plane had never heard of
the store, the broker, or its own container — and handed a database
module 5432, which the store already had.
So the machine says. The host records what each resource binds,
distinguishing what it carried from what the mesh sent — a distinction
that already existed so the two never remove each other — and reports
the carried ones. The node states and this context writes, which is the
shape of every message between them.
What the declaration binds, not what is open. A machine's open ports are
a moving target, and assigning around them would mean a port that was
free when it was asked for and taken when it was used.
Replaced whole each time rather than merged: a machine that gave a port
back must be believed about that too, and a set that only grows keeps a
port reserved for something no longer there.
Tested against a real database, and the tests bite — removing the check
hands the module 20000, which the machine had said it holds.
novox/hq ADR 0038. A module cannot choose a port: it is written once and
assigned anywhere, so any number it picks is a guess about a machine it
has never seen. A database module met the mesh's own store on 5432 and
was told, by a container runtime three layers down, that the port was
already allocated.
The number used to appear three times in every module — the rule set,
what a consumer is told, and what the runtime publishes — agreeing only
because one person wrote all three. Now it appears once, in `listens`,
and the other two are derived: the container publishes `20000:5432`, the
consumer is told 20000, and the rule set opens 20000.
An assignment is made once and kept, as a credential is. A port that
moved on every declaration would restart both ends each time and hand a
consumer a number that was true when it was read.
Ports the protocol fixes — mail on 25, submission on 587, DNS on 53 —
say so, and are then claims: one holder per machine, and the second is
refused by name at assignment. That is the mechanism the mesh already
has for what is singular on a machine, pointed at ports.
A mapping written the long way is left exactly as it is. Some things
must be pinned by hand, and quietly overruling somebody who wrote both
halves would be worse than not offering the short form.
Still open, and known: the substrate is not a module, so the mesh has
never heard of its own store and cannot yet assign around it. That is
what 028 will still be about after this.
This is what stopped the forge. The host refused the whole declaration:
resource "postgres.server": a container does not use "restart-on",
and it is set. Refused rather than ignored
`restart-on` belongs to a service. I put it on containers this morning
so one would pick up a rotated credential — nine times across seven
modules — and nothing between the manifest and the machine said a word.
The control plane composed it happily; the parser accepted it; the
manifest tests passed. The only thing that knew was the host, five steps
downstream, and hearing from it cost a seventeen-minute run.
The host was right twice over. It refused, and it refused *everything*,
because applying the parts it understood would leave a machine that
looks configured and is not. One misplaced key therefore stops a module
dead, which is the correct severity and an argument for catching it
where it is written.
So the shapes and their keys are now written down here and checked. They
are duplicated from another repository deliberately — this is its wire
format, like the shape of a grant file — and a contract with two copies
and no check is a contract until somebody edits one.
What this does not fix is why I reached for it: a container cannot
follow a file. Filed separately.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/026. Four modules mounted fourteen host paths that no
resource declared — the mail spool, the databases, the object store's
data. Each would be created by the container runtime as root, with a
mode nobody chose, so `owner` and `mode` went unapplied on exactly the
directories that matter.
The worse half: a directory the mesh declared and no longer wants is
kept rather than removed when it holds anything the mesh did not put
there. That rule is the answer to what happens to data when a module
goes away, and it is written in terms of declared directories. An
undeclared one is not covered. So the one rule guarding against data
loss reached the configuration directories, which are cheap to lose, and
missed the data directories, which are why the rule exists.
The cause is worth naming. These manifests were written by reading the
arrangement being replaced and carrying its compose files across —
service, image, ports, volumes, environment. The container shape can
express all of that, which is what made the transliteration feel like
progress. A shape that can express a compose file gets filled in like
one, and a volume line borrowed from compose declares no owner, no mode
and no intent.
Declared parent-first, because the host applies in the order written and
does not sort. The check is mechanical now, because a person comparing
volumes against directories by hand is the process that produced this.
Still open, and bigger: whether these paths are where a module's data
should live at all. They were inherited whole, and they decide what a
person backs up.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/025. Every image reference in every example module
was sixty-four zeros — eighteen of them across five modules. Each
parsed, resolved, and composed into a declaration a host accepts, and
none could ever have started: the machine reaches `docker pull` and
stops. That is why those modules were written and not running, and no
check saw it because every check passed.
The host validates the shape of a reference and nothing more, which is
correct: verifying a digest exists means reaching a registry, and that
is the one thing a host must never have to do. So the last place that
could catch this is the wrong place to try.
The guard therefore sits where a declaration is composed, not where a
manifest is parsed. A file in a repository is allowed to await a pin —
the design already says the manifest in a repository names artifacts
while the manifest the mesh holds names digests, and the bundle works
exactly that way. What must never happen is a placeholder reaching a
machine, and composing is the last moment before one does.
Twelve third-party images resolved to real digests without pulling
anything, which is also the mechanism the open issue needs. Two
discoveries came free: mailu publishes to ghcr rather than Docker Hub,
so seven references named repositories that do not exist at all; and it
renamed roundcube to webmail, so that one would have failed even with
the right registry.
What stays a placeholder is the mesh's own provisioner images, which
genuinely have no digest until built and pushed — the bundle's problem,
legitimately unresolved here. The stand-in consumer now stands in with
a real image rather than an invented one.
The lab is pointed at a path for the builder it should write, and I
pointed it at the repository root instead of build/, which .gitignore
already covers. Two of today's commits carry the compiled binary as a
result.
Untracked and ignored by name, so the same slip does not land it again.
I wrote that a test asserts the control plane's placeholder expression
and the host's still agree. None does, and none in this repository could
— a unit test here can only assert what this repository already
believes.
That is precisely the thing this project refuses to tolerate: a stated
rule with no way to check it, which costs more than no rule because
people believe it. Written by me, today, in the same file that closes a
gap of the same kind.
What actually proves it is the lab, and the comment now says so.
Found by reading the manifests rather than by running them. Two of the
provisioner images the examples name had no way to be produced: the
object store's had a Dockerfile and no target, and Keycloak's did not
exist at all — no image, no Dockerfile, no program.
A module naming an image nothing produces resolves, plans, pushes and
stops on the machine at `docker pull`, which is the fault arriving as
far from its cause as it can get.
The object store's target is added. Keycloak's provisioner is removed
from its manifest, because writing a manifest for a program that does
not exist is the same mistake as the .env files: it parses, it resolves,
and it could never work.
That makes keycloak's manifest true about today — a server the mesh
runs, with its database and its admin credential — and it makes the gap
loud. Keycloak no longer claims to provide oidc-client, so a consumer
asking for one is refused at plan time by name, rather than resolving
cleanly and never having a client created.
The check covers only images beginning `mesh-`. Postgres and the rest
come from a registry and are somebody else's to build; what this bounds
is the set this repository is responsible for and might forget.
The keycloak check was written while keycloak was the module being
worked on, which is how a check ends up proving one thing about one
file. It now runs over every example that requires something, and asks
the two questions that matter for all of them: that no ${bound:...}
reached the machine as a value, and that anything named PASSWORD is
still a hole only the host can fill.
The first is the one worth having. A placeholder written through is read
as a value by whatever parses the file — a connection to a host called
"${bound:postgres-database:at}" — and the failure names neither the
module nor the mesh.
Modules whose requirements nothing in the examples answers are logged
and passed over, because that is a fact about the example set rather
than about them.
A contribution that is not a credential grant — a module offering
something to another on its own machine — has nobody to be identified
to, and was carrying an empty `as`. A field that is always present and
usually empty teaches a reader to ignore it, including when it is not.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/023. A consumer was given its password, the address,
the port and where its credential lives, and still could not connect —
the user name was invented by the provisioner and recorded nowhere, and
the rest sat in a JSON binding that a program reading KEY=value cannot
use.
Both halves have the same cause: the mesh knew something and did not say
it.
**Who a consumer is, said once.** The provisioner used to derive
mesh_<node>_<module> and that string existed nowhere else — not in the
control plane, not in the binding, and above all not at the consumer,
which has to present it. Now the mesh derives it once and sends it to
both ends, so they agree by construction rather than by two conventions
that were the same on the day they were written. The provisioners refuse
to invent one if the mesh says nothing, because falling back to a name
of their own would create a role the consumer would never guess and
everything would report success.
**Bound values reach the file that needs them.** ${bound:provision:key}
is the symmetric twin of the sealed placeholder, and simpler: these
values are not secret, so the control plane fills them in before sending
and the host gains no field and learns no format. It stays
name-agnostic — at, as and from are true of any provision, and every
other key comes from what the provider said it serves.
The asymmetry it removes was backwards. The secret is the hard case,
because the mesh must not be able to read it, and the secret was the
part that already arrived.
Keycloak and Gitea now produce complete connections, asserted from the
manifests on disk rather than from fixtures: every part filled, no
placeholder surviving as a value, and the password still a hole only the
host can close. Three faults injected, each caught.
A module may not declare an action: the link may not carry a command to
run, and that bound is what limits a compromised control plane to shapes
it cannot turn into arbitrary code (novox/hq ADR 0005). The host
enforces it, correctly and in the right place.
But a module's resources reach a machine over the link, so a manifest
carrying an action was accepted here, stored, resolved, planned and
pushed — and refused on the machine, in the host's log, with nothing
connecting it back to the manifest that caused it.
The rule held. It was just unusable, which is the same shape as the
network shape earlier today: the refusal was right, arrived far from its
cause, and nobody was reading the log.
The refusal names the rule and what to do instead, because "you may not"
with no alternative is where a module author stops.
Found while checking a claim I had written in the coverage document —
that a module cannot declare one. It could; it just could not deliver
it. The document is corrected.
Every one of these declared `own-secrets` pointing at a path called
`.env` and then mounted it as `env-file`. The file's whole content is
the password. Docker reads that as a malformed line and the container
starts with no password set — which is not a failure to start, it is a
service running with the wrong credential.
They parsed, they resolved, and none of them could ever have worked.
That is what a manifest checked only by the parser buys.
Each now keeps the sealed file as what it is — a password, alone — and
declares a file beside it whose content says ${secret:name}. The host
fills the hole on the machine, which is the only place both halves
exist. The provisioners mount the bare file, because they read a
password file and always did.
Two tests, both driven from the manifests on disk rather than from
fixtures: every ${secret:x} must name something the module declared, and
nothing may read a bare password file as an env file. Injecting the
shipped bug reproduces it word for word.
Keycloak, Gitea and Mailu still cannot connect to their databases, for
the reason in 04-ISSUES/023 — the user name is the provisioner's
invention and the bound values cannot reach a config file. Their own
credentials are right now; that half was independent and is done.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/022. A credential was keyed by provision, consumer
node and provider node, so "who is asking" was answered by naming a
host. The node this mesh exists to take over runs eight modules against
one database server.
The symptom had two halves and only one was loud. The provider refused,
naming the modules and explaining they would share one credential, which
reads as a decision rather than a limit. The consumer did not refuse: it
resolved cleanly, wrote one module's credential file and left the others
absent — a service that starts and cannot authenticate, with nothing
saying why. That is 021 again on a different axis.
Three modules wanting one database produced one need, carrying whichever
module mentioned it first, because the resolution walk is a work-list
over names. The fan-out now happens in one place, after the walk. The
record path already did this correctly and said why: a consumer here is
a module on a machine. It is the same rule.
Downstream: the secret's key gains the consuming module, the grant file
is named after both halves, needs are matched by provision and module
rather than provision alone, and the provisioners name the role and the
access key after the module. The refusal in ContributionsTo is gone
because there is nothing left to refuse.
Worth stating plainly: without that refusal, gitea's login would have
opened keycloak's database. From the provisioner's side it created
exactly what it was asked to create.
Existing secrets are discarded rather than backfilled. They cannot say
which module they were for, and a secret is remade and delivered to both
ends on the next push — so this costs one rotation and invents nothing.
Also guards the role name against PostgreSQL's 63-byte truncation, which
is a notice rather than an error and would reintroduce exactly this
collision at a length nobody tests.
Three faults injected — the fan-out removed, needs matched by name
alone, the grant file named after the machine — each caught.
jschoubben