mesh/state.get, put, delete, keys and watch on the stdio channel, from the
buckets the membership issues. A watch hands the current values without
deletions, then every change, and is answered once the current values are
delivered. Refused with the reason: state not issued, a reader's write, a
value with a credential-named field — the bus alone would answer a refused
write with a timeout.
A push sends the machine that needs a grant and the bus's machine in the same breath, and the
runtime can subscribe the moment before the bus reloads its user list. Refused once, the
subscription stayed dead until some later membership re-served it, and a newly assigned module ran
unreachable. A refused subject the runtime answers is now asked for again for about five minutes.
After the controller stopped granting a mesh seat to claimants that do not hold it, an image built
before the runtime followed its membership still subscribed the seat's subject, and the refusal
ended the process: ace's postgres runtime crash-looped. A subject the grants leave out now costs
that subject only, as an announcement's already did (issue 217).
The runtime added every seat its start-up credential claims even after the mesh issued a
membership without it. A seat held once for the mesh is claimed on every machine running the
module, so ace's postgres announced the store seat the bus then refused it on.
mesh-tools stands on mesh-sdk's published package: the build receives its exact version and
installs it after the package.json install, so a release is a new argument and the cached layer
cannot keep an older SDK; the planner orders the toolchain after the SDK, and every bundle after the
toolchain (issue 211). esbuild, a development dependency, is what the builder bundles each
TypeScript entrypoint and launcher into one file with.
The raw subscription that answers discovery ran its loop unguarded, so a refusal escaped as an
unhandled rejection and ended the process: every per-module container crash-looped on 2026-10-03
over a subscription that only serves the mesh seeing the runtime. It is now caught, logged, and the
runtime serves on. Tested against a bus whose permissions refuse the subject; fails without it.
The controller announces the mesh-controller seat without a machine — the seat is the mesh's — and
the console then reported it as not answering on the machine it is assigned to. An announcement that
names no machine now answers for wherever its module is assigned.
Both runtimes subscribed $SRV.<verb>.> as a wildcard; the grants allow the bare question and the
service's own name and instance. The bus refused the wildcard, and the TypeScript runtime treats a
refused subscription as fatal, so every per-module container crash-looped after the image rolled.
They now subscribe exactly $SRV.<verb>, $SRV.<verb>.<name> and $SRV.<verb>.<name>.<id>.
A launched bundle's mesh/subscribe binds the module's own durable consumer — EVENTS, <node>_<module>,
by name as the module's own runtime bound it, so nothing is lost or replayed in the move — and every
event goes to each child of the module that subscribed as mesh/event, acknowledged only when all
answered, negatively acknowledged after a short delay when one failed or died, terminated when it is
not an event. mesh/ask calls a tool as the module. Every launched bundle is started again when it
exits, with backoff, since long-running code waits for no call. Requires SDK 0.1.6.
The per-module containers still run this runtime; their tools and the seats they hold (the store's,
the catalogue's) must be found by the console the same way as the node runtime's. It answers
$SRV.PING, $SRV.INFO and $SRV.STATS with one service per process, one endpoint per tool per subject
and per seat verb served, the metadata as the Go runtime writes it.
The Go runtime answers $SRV.PING, $SRV.INFO and $SRV.STATS (and per name and id) in the
io.nats.micro.v1 format with what it serves at the moment it is asked: one service per runtime
process, since the bus admits one reply per request from each responder, and one endpoint per tool
per subject, its metadata saying module, seat, scope, machine, description, schema and whether the
module is interchangeable. Serving is unchanged.
The console gathers one $SRV.INFO request's answers instead of asking the catalogue's roster and
each module's tools, and reads the controller's records as JSON for what should have answered: an
assignment with tools that did not announce is named, a module without tools never is. The text
parsers of node list and module list are gone. Packages share the test bus: go test -p 1.
mesh_overview, mesh_machine, mesh_search, mesh_describe and mesh_call walk the mesh's structure;
every tool has one address per layer: <seat>.<verb>, <node>/<seat>.<verb>, <node>/<module>.<tool>,
and <module>.<tool> for a module the mesh issued a plain subject. A stateful module called without
its machine, a node seat without one, a mesh seat with one, or a module on the wrong machine is
refused naming what would work. Answers come from the mesh when asked, kept five seconds, so a tool
that arrives mid-session is found. The flat catalogue stays behind MESH_CONSOLE_FLAT=1 and old
<module>.<tool> names still answer.
The node's runtime is the Go binary: one static executable the host runs as ./node-tools from its own
bundle. Node.js stays on the machine for the TypeScript bundles the runtime launches. The TypeScript
source stays in the repository: it is the runtime image the per-module containers run until WP4c.
The toolchain image installs from this package.json with a range; unchanged, Docker reused the
cached install and the image kept SDK 0.1.3 after 0.1.5 was published. Bundles copied that copy, so
a launched bundle registering its seat first served the seat's verbs as its own tools. Requiring
0.1.5 says what the runtime and its bundles need, and invalidates the cached layer.
The runtime knows no language, so nothing ties it to Node.js. This ports its serve mode — the
pinned bus connection and patient connect, following memberships, launching every served bundle
over MCP on stdio with its own environment, a child's emit published as its module, each tool,
the tools verb and seat verbs served where the mesh issued them, and the console on loopback —
to one static binary. Same subjects, request and reply bodies, event headers and MCP answers.
The TypeScript stays: it is still the runtime inside the per-module containers until WP4c.
Tests run against a real bus and share the TypeScript fixtures.
Every served entrypoint is started as a process speaking MCP over stdio, told its module and node;
one that is not executable is refused by name. The import path, the SDK resolve hook (issue 209)
and the per-registration hand-off go. The one-module form the per-module containers use is still
imported until they move (to-be 38 WP4c). A child's mesh/publish is published as its module and
answered once accepted; a child that dies says why in its own last words. Fixtures are served
through launchers exactly as the builder writes them.
node-tools sets MESH_SERVED_MODULE for each child it launches, so the SDK's stdio loop lists that
module's tools by their names and a seat's verbs as the seat's, whichever was registered first.
The mesh composes every served module's words into MESH_TOOL_ENV; the runtime takes it at start
and removes it from its own environment, then gives each registration's contributor and each
launched child the runtime's words plus its own module's, never another's. Against an SDK
without collectToolsEach it says so and serves with the runtime's words only. The test serves
two imported bundles and one launched, each answering with its own words and none of the others'.
A bundle carries its dependencies, the SDK among them; imported in-process that copy was a
second SDK with its own tool registry, so a bundle registered its tools into a list the
runtime never read and served nothing, silently. A resolve hook (module.registerHooks, in
thread; module.register is deprecated from Node 26) now sends every import of
@novox/mesh-sdk, from whichever bundle, to the runtime's own copy: one registry, one broker.
The test loads a bundle from a directory holding its own SDK copy and sees its tool served.
One repository, two modules (ADR 0069). `node-tools/` holds the runtime — its code, tests, package
and the manifest of the module the controller composes a process for on every machine it is
assigned to: a bundle of `src/main.js`, the interpreter as a package, a place for the node's
credential, the loopback port the console declared, and leave to call every tool. Nothing about
how it runs: which bundles to load, where the credential is and whose machine it is are the
controller's to compose (WP2). The root module `mesh-tools` keeps the two images TypeScript
bundles are compiled in and a module's own service may run in; it is no longer how tools reach a
node.
As node-tools, `serve` is also the console (ADR 0175 §6): the same process answers MCP on
loopback for whoever is on the machine, through which the tools it serves can be called. A
module's own runtime in a container keeps serving without a listener.
The toolchain image now carries /app/runtime — a package.json saying the compiled files are ES
modules and the production node_modules — for the builder to copy into every TypeScript bundle,
so a bundle unpacked on a machine starts (ADR 0188 §5; the builder's side is the controller's).
Proven here by compiling node-tools with the toolchain's exact flags and starting the result.
The AMQP probe script is gone with the bus it probed.
The runtime imported a bundle into its own process, which only JavaScript can be. Now an entrypoint
that is not a plain JavaScript file — or is one marked executable — is started as a child with the
runtime's environment and asked `tools/list` once and `tools/call` per call; what it lists is
registered exactly as an imported bundle's registrations are, a `<seat>.<verb>` name as the seat's
implementation. So a tools bundle may be in any language, and the mesh's part — the subjects, the
seats, the `tools` answer, a failed bundle named — stays in the runtime and is shared by all of
them. A child that exits mid-call tells the caller so and is started again on its next call.
Proven against a real bus beside the three bundles already there: a Python bundle with no SDK at
all answers its tool and its seat verb; a TypeScript bundle written against the protocol and marked
executable is served through the launcher, shortcut off; a bundle told to exit is relaunched.
One tool runtime per node, host-side, is what the runtime was written to be; the catalogue built a
container per module around it instead. This lets `serve` take a list — MESH_TOOL_MODULES as
<module>=<entrypoint> entries — and do for every assigned module what it did for one: read that
module's membership and follow it, serve its tools where the membership says, serve each held
seat's verbs on the seat's subjects. The seats come from the memberships now, so the node's
credential carries no claims; a module's own runtime still reads its credential's, so nothing
built today changes behaviour. A bare path in MESH_TOOL_MODULES stays the one-module form.
A bundle that throws on import is said in the log and in what `tools` answers for its module
(`failed`), which discovery lists with the reason instead of as "not answering"; the other bundles
serve. The filter that dropped every registration under a name but the one module goes; what
stays is that a registration under a seat's name is served only where some served module claims
the seat. A tool runs attributed to its module, so an event it emits lands on the module's
subject and not the runtime's. MESH_OPERATOR_ACCOUNT and MESH_OPERATOR_HOME are read and said;
tools take them from their environment.
Proven against a real bus: three bundles, one broken; five tools and two seat verbs answer on
their subjects; `tools` names the failed bundle; a membership re-issued mid-run re-serves.
The listing left node-scoped seats out, so <seat>.<verb> never resolved as a
seat's and the call went to a module subject nothing served. Listed now with
their scope: the schema requires the machine, the call carries it in the
subject, and a call without one is refused in words.
jochen
mesh-admin
jschoubben