hyperhive/swarm-controller
Repository files (latest commit first)
Filename Latest commit message Latest commit date
atlas 4007fc965d swarm-controller: create each hive's cert-auth role at startup
A hive holds an mTLS pair and a policy naming what it may read, and still
cannot log in: nothing creates the role that maps its certificate to that
policy. The one pre-shared credential in the system therefore buys no
access.

Minting happens here rather than in nix, which was the first plan. Nix
mints from the store's own container, and that path is gated on the
bootstrap token -- so onboarding a hive later would mean placing the one
genuinely pre-shared secret again. Doing it from the controller costs a
public certificate authority as an input and makes the bootstrap token
one-time.

A startup pass, not a hook: the hive list is loaded once and a config
change means a redeploy, so the roles are as static as the list. Only the
policy is derived from something that moves.

The subject is the hive's name because glue-bao-tls.nix mints a hive's
client leaf with its name as the CN, and cert auth matches on that.

Per-hive failures are logged and skipped, matching the queue, bridge and
forge connects above it: a controller whose store is unreachable still
serves everything else, and the next start retries.

Not covered by a test: ensure_hive_roles is IO from end to end, and the
seam that would make it assertable is the one the read-grant sink already
has. Said here rather than implied by a green suite.
2026-09-10 00:25:07 +02:00
..
src swarm-controller: create each hive's cert-auth role at startup 2026-09-10 00:25:07 +02:00
Cargo.toml swarm-controller: accept an agent's external matrix account and put it in the store 2026-09-08 15:53:50 +02:00
README.md check-issue-refs: catch full forge issue URLs too, drop internal links from docs entirely 2026-09-09 21:15:28 +02:00

swarm-controller

The swarm-level daemon. Where hive-c0re owns the agents on one host, this owns what is true across hives — so a swarm runs one of them and most hives leave it off.

Opt-in per host via services.hyperhive.deploy.swarm-controller.enable, which is deliberately not derived from services.hyperhive.enable: turning it on is a statement about swarm topology, not about whether hyperhive is installed.

What it does today

Serves one /health endpoint and holds no state.

That is the whole intent of the first slice. The point is to make the unit real — service user, runtime and state directories, socket, nginx reachability — so the swarm-level surfaces that follow have somewhere to land. Inventing those surfaces before they are agreed would bake in a shape nobody chose. See the hyperhive.swarm consolidation epic.

Why a unix socket, not a port

The hive-gateway's nginx is the only intended client and reaches the socket through a bind-mount. A listener that is never bound to an address cannot be reached from off-host by mistake.

The socket path is services.hyperhive.deploy.swarm-controller.socketPath, default /run/swarm-controller/controller.sock, exported to the process as SWARM_CONTROLLER_SOCKET.

⚠️ The socket's directory is its access control

The socket is 0666. It has to be: nginx runs as a different user and connect(2) needs write. This matches how hive-c0re publishes the per-agent sockets, and rests on the same argument — "the bind source dir is per-agent on host so blast radius is unchanged."

What keeps that safe is that the directory holds one socket. So:

Never point socketPath at a directory that carries anything else. /run/hyperhive above all — it holds host.sock, the host admin socket. Pointing nginx at that directory to reach this socket would put the admin socket within its reach too.

nginx is a host service, so nothing narrows what it can reach except the directory itself — that is the whole of the access control. A unit test pins the default path so a tidying edit fails instead of reviewing cleanly.

RuntimeDirectoryPreserve=yes and the daemon's stale-socket unlink on start are a pair: preserving the directory without the unlink means bind fails with EADDRINUSE after a restart.

Packaging

Built by the workspace derivation and extracted as its own package (nix build .#swarm-controller). Deliberately not in nix/packages' daemonBins — that list is the core stack and drives the bundle services.hyperhive.c0re.package points at, so folding this in would put a swarm-scoped service into every hive's closure.