Per mara on the PR: less implementation detail, more operator focus. The
section argued why the design is shaped as it is - a cache would
disagree with itself, freshness must be derived rather than stored, the
timestamp is the server's - which is reasoning a reader of this page does
not need and cannot act on.
It now answers what an operator actually asks: what each freshness value
means they should do, what to set the threshold to and why that number,
what a 503 tells them, and that nothing publishes yet so an empty board
is expected rather than broken.
The design rationale is not lost, it is just homed where it belongs: the
status module's own doc comment, next to the code it constrains.
The controller connects to the swarm queue as its own client and serves
what each hive last said about itself at GET /api/hives/status.
THE QUEUE IS THE STORE. A hive publishes into the `hive-status` JetStream
KV bucket (history 1) and the controller reads it per request, keeping no
copy. A cache here would be a second answer to the same question, free to
disagree with the first, and the disagreement surfaces as a hive reading
healthy on a dashboard while the bucket says otherwise. Whichever side
arrives first creates the bucket; both want the same shape.
Rows come from the roster rather than from the bucket, so an empty bucket
renders as a swarm nobody has heard from instead of a healthy one, and
`never_reported` stays distinct from `stale` - went quiet is a fault,
never spoke is usually a deployment that has not happened. Freshness is
derived at read time and never stored as a flag, because a stored
`healthy` boolean goes stale silently the moment nothing arrives, which
is the failure this endpoint is designed against. The timestamp is the
NATS server's, applied when the value landed, so a publisher cannot make
itself look fresher than it is.
Authentication is per connection attempt, not per process. Authelia
issues `client_credentials` tokens that expire in 3599s, and auth happens
at CONNECT, so a long-lived connection is fine but a reconnect an hour
later needs a token minted an hour later. `with_auth_callback` is re-run
by async-nats for each attempt, which handles expiry by construction
rather than by a timer - the alternative fails in the way this subsystem
exists to prevent, with the controller still serving while its data
quietly stops updating.
Three failure shapes are deliberate:
- A half-set environment is fatal; an absent one is not. Silently
behaving like an unconfigured host is how every hive ends up reading
`never_reported` with nothing to point at.
- The endpoint answers 503 rather than an empty list when the store
cannot be read. "I cannot reach the store" and "every hive is silent"
are different answers, and rendering the second turns a local fault
into an apparent swarm-wide outage.
- `retry_on_initial_connect` makes the daemon and the queue bootable in
either order, and the status handler refuses when the client is not
Connected rather than issuing a request into it - a request made in
that window does not fail, it waits, so every poll would hang and
learn nothing. `Pending` is the state a never-connected client is in,
which is why the test is `!= Connected` and not `== Disconnected`.
The rendering rules are a pure function over a map, so the semantics are
tested against a table rather than against a running server. The KV read,
the credential rotation and the 503 paths are covered behaviourally
instead: a real NATS server with a rotating token endpoint, asserting
that the controller recovers only when the credential rotates, and
mutation-tested by holding the credential wrong for the same window.
Per mara on the CA question: outside all-local this is an ops problem,
and what is missing is documentation rather than machinery.
One row per secret, read against three topologies, because the same
credential is generated in place on one and handed over by an operator on
another. sso.md's table is replaced by a pointer -- two tables listing the
same secrets would drift, and its prose about why a secret is generated
in-container is the half worth keeping there.
States the constraint the whole thing rests on: a hive CA is name-
constrained to the hive domain and a swarm service name is a sibling of
it, so a hive CA cannot issue a swarm-service certificate at all. That is
why placing the swarm root is an operations decision.
Per mara on the PR: the guide someone follows on a fresh deploy is a
different page from the one they read while debugging, and only the
second existed.
Also fixes a contradiction the request surfaced: setup.md and
swarm/sso.md have told every operator to create '--group admins' since
the bootstrap step existed, while the new rule required 'operators'.
This is the first rule that CONSUMES a group name, so it takes the one
the guide already creates - inventing a second would have meant every
account made by following the guide silently failing the check it was
supposed to pass, and for mara specifically a migration step that now
may not be needed at all.
setup.md's step 3 says why --group is not decoration; the new step 4
says what decides whether the page opens (the group, and the name
resolving) rather than listing a command, because there is nothing to
run. Steps renumbered, including the matrix block's internal 4a-4e.
New docs/swarm/ui.md (split-page shape, per the docs rule), linked from
the swarm README and added to the gateway's vhost map.
Leads with the step that separates 'protected' from 'locked out':
swarmctl user add <you> --group operators. auth_request asks whether
there is a session; the access_control rule is what makes it mean
operator, and an account created before the rule existed has no groups.
Also records the four wiring sites a swarm service name needs, with the
certificate one called out - serviceDomains is both the sub-CA's
nameConstraints set and the leaf's SANs, and the apex is a sibling of
the other three rather than a parent, so nothing issues for it
implicitly.
The question this answers is "what do I have to configure, and where" —
so the table of secrets is the deliverable and the prose is scaffolding
around it.
The organising idea worth keeping: a secret belongs in-container when
nothing outside that container reads it. Every one of authelia's own
secrets passes that test; the client secret's plaintext fails it, which
is what makes delivery a problem at all rather than a detail.
`services.hyperhive.domain` and `swarm.hives.<hiveName>.domain` were two
homes for one value with nothing asserting they agreed. The failure that
buys is the worst shape a config defect has: it evaluates cleanly, and
the symptom ("the other hives can't reach me") appears on a machine
other than the misconfigured one.
The directory is now the single source. `hives.<name>.domain` gains the
`<name>.<swarm.domain>` default -- a derivation from two values an
operator had to state explicitly, not a guess -- so a conventional swarm
is a list of names and a hive addressed by something else says so in the
one place every other hive reads. `services.hyperhive.domain` reads its
own entry; the direct formula is deleted rather than kept as a fallback,
which would have restored the second path (and, reading `swarm.domain`
itself, a second path that can disagree).
Setting it directly still wins, with a deprecation warning: nothing
breaks today, but a value written only there is invisible to the swarm.
The self-entry assertion now fires on an EMPTY directory too. Since
`swarm.domain` became required, every hive is in a swarm -- a swarm of
one is still a swarm -- and this host's address is read out of the
directory, so the entry is missing either way and the precise message
should be the one that fires.
Upgrading costs one line on hives that never listed themselves:
`services.hyperhive.swarm.hives.<hiveName> = { };`, no value.
One attrset describing every hive in the swarm including this one,
identical on every host, with hiveName selecting which entry is us.
"My peers" is derived (swarm.peerHives) rather than declared.
Every field in the old per-host peer list was intrinsic to the hive it
described, never to the pair -- so the list was a directory each host
kept its own copy of. Beyond the deduplication it removes a bug class:
two hosts could hold different endpoints for the same third hive with
nothing to detect the disagreement.
Drops the per-hive caCert. Trust inside a swarm derives from the swarm
root, which every hive chains to. What that genuinely removes is
trusting a hive whose root this swarm does not own -- a cross-swarm
problem that wants a mechanism of its own, not a field that happened to
work.
The matrix container's certificateFiles block goes with it and could
NOT be migrated: that list is read at build time and the swarm root is
a runtime file (its key must never enter the store), so there is no
build-time name to put there. caCert being a nix path was precisely
what made it the build-time distribution channel. Agents are unaffected
-- hive-tls folds the root into the hive trust bundle and the meta
renderer embeds that one file. Tracked separately.
Migration is an assertion plus warnings, not a rename: hives is peers
union {self}, and the set gains a member no existing config has written
down. A rename migrates a name and a default can re-root a meaning;
neither can conjure a new member. The warning explains, the self-entry
assertion stops the build.
Second split under docs/swarm/, following the shape docs/turn-loop/ and
docs/web-ui/ already use.
The README keeps the `## Swarm CA` heading rather than deleting it: an
existing cross-reference targets that anchor, and a heading is the
cheapest thing to preserve. It now carries the one-paragraph summary and
a pointer, so a reader who lands on the anchor still arrives somewhere
that answers the question.
The CA page also absorbs three things that were true but undocumented —
why the trust bundle rather than the bare intermediate (openssl will not
terminate a chain at a non-self-signed anchor without -partial_chain),
that autoConfigure derives from enableAllLocalDefaults, and that the
name constraint excludes both IP families because a permitted-DNS-only
constraint says nothing about IP SANs.
Both worked from the flat docs/swarm.md and resolve one directory
short from docs/swarm/README.md: snapshot-store.md stayed in docs/,
and swarm-controller/README.md is at the repo root.
`docs/swarm.md` becomes `docs/swarm/README.md` and the shared-services
material moves to `docs/swarm/services.md`, following the shape
`docs/turn-loop/` and `docs/web-ui/` already use. The README keeps a
pointer so the reading path is unbroken.
Every referrer moved with it — five docs pages, two option descriptions
in swarm.nix, and CLAUDE.md's reading path. A pointer to a file that
moved is worse than one to a file that was deleted: the content still
exists, so the reader concludes the note is wrong rather than the path.
