A single secret that turned any request into an operator was the only
credential several routes accepted, and it had no caller left: the device
pairing it existed for is on hold, and nothing in this tree or any client
sent it. What remained was a key that bypassed authentication entirely,
required to boot, and checked by nobody.
Every route behind it had a better answer available:
- Library and game sync move to host credentials. Both took a `userId` in
the body, which meant one secret could write into anybody's library. A
host now says which of its enrolled users a batch is for, and that claim
is checked against the Steam sign-ins it actually holds — one box carries
several people's accounts, so the pair is the unit.
- Download-state reporting narrows to hosts alone, and the body that could
name a different host is gone. Which host is reporting comes from its own
credentials, and a body that still names one is refused rather than
ignored.
- Linking a Steam account is always for the caller.
- Creating a game by hand is deleted; syncing already upserts the catalogue.
- Reading the waitlist is deleted. Every address on it belongs to someone
who has not agreed to anything, and answering it over HTTP made that list
something a leaked key could drain.
- The pairing-code routes are deleted with the flow they served. The domain
module and its table stay, so returning to it is a route file rather than
a migration.
Nothing in the API now accepts a credential that stands for more than one
caller: every request resolves to a specific user or a specific host, which
is what lets a route say "the caller's own library" and mean it.
BREAKING CHANGE: the `x-nestri-admin-token` header is no longer accepted and
`ADMIN_SHARED_SECRET` is no longer read. `POST /games`, `GET /waitlist` and
the `/pairing-code` routes are gone; `POST /games/sync` and `POST /library/sync`
now require host credentials and take `userId` in the body; `POST /steam/link`
no longer accepts `userId`; `POST /games/download-state` no longer accepts
`hostId`.
The example generator emitted twenty-five payload characters where an id has
twenty-six, so every documented id was twenty-nine characters — one short of
the width the column holds and, since last commit, one short of what the schema
publishing it will accept. Nothing caught it because an example is never
parsed: it is copied into documentation and read by people.
The width now comes from the generator's own constant instead of being typed
out, in the two places that had counted it by hand. Counting twenty-six of
anything by eye is a thing people get right once and never re-check.
A test pins the three together — a generated id, the schema for one, and the
documented example must all agree, for every prefix. It fails on the
off-by-one that prompted this, and on a prefix without its separator, which
would otherwise read as an id of that type because it starts with the same
three letters.
A host that signs a person into Steam ends up holding a refresh token. The
control plane needs to know that happened — to show it, and so a host that
lost its disk can find out what it is expected to hold — but it must not know
the credential, because the token is bound to the address that obtained it and
a copy anywhere else is the account-theft signal Steam watches for.
So `steam_enrolment` stores the outcome and has no token column, no encrypted
token column, and no column that could hold one later. The safeguard is that
the credential is never sent here at all; a nullable column would be the first
step in undoing it, so a test asserts the column list exactly and fails if one
appears. Three machine-authenticated routes go with it: report a completed
sign-in, report that Steam refused the token, and list what this host should
have. All three take the host from its own credentials, so a box can neither
report onto nor read another box's hardware. Their bodies are strict, so a
host that sends a token is told it is wrong rather than quietly believed —
which also keeps the value out of the request log.
The Steam id is deliberately not unique. One account signed in on two hosts is
two rows and two tokens, and a unique index there would look like hygiene while
refusing somebody their second box.
There is no `pending` state: a sign-in challenge lives about two minutes inside
one process, and nothing outside it needs to know it exists. Nothing revokes
yet, and `last_ok_at` has no writer — a successful logon happens where there is
no credential to report it with — so the column exists with the shape it will
need and stays null rather than being filled with the nearest event that was
easy to observe.
Three things review caught, and one shape correction.
**No credential has a default any more.** The compose file shipped
`ADMIN_SHARED_SECRET` falling back to a value written in this repository —
and that header bypasses token verification entirely, so anyone reading
the file could act as an operator against any deployment that had not
overridden it. A default is worth less than it looks here: the deployment
that never set the variable is exactly the one where the default is public.
Every credential now comes from `.env`, and compose refuses to start naming
the variable it wanted. That also takes the last literal password out of a
tracked file.
**The origin ports are on loopback.** Both services speak plain HTTP and
mark no cookie `Secure`, because both expect to sit behind something that
terminates TLS. Published on every interface they were a way to reach the
issuer around that proxy, with sign-in codes and tokens in clear text.
**Mail settings are passed through rather than fixed.** The issuer was
pinned to printing sign-in codes to its log, and the three delivery
settings never reached it — so the documented way to configure mail could
not work, and every code and recipient went to the container log instead.
Printing codes is now asked for in `.env` like everything else, and with
nothing configured the issuer refuses to send rather than logging.
**Sandbox becomes a domain rather than a prefix.** `api.sandbox.nestri.io`
and `auth.sandbox.nestri.io`, because sandbox holds whatever is not
production and that set grows. One certificate for `*.sandbox.nestri.io`
then covers all of it, including unpredictable per-pull-request names,
and cannot be presented for production's own domain — which the zone-wide
wildcard the previous shape leaned on could.
Also drops `STEAM_API_KEY`. It was declared in two type definitions and
read by nothing: linking an account makes no outbound call that needs it.
CLAUDE.md was 1,324 lines and all of it was about the TypeScript half, written
before there was another half. Every line of it loaded on every turn regardless
of what was being worked on, which is a real cost paid constantly for context
that is usually irrelevant.
Split by where it applies, so each guide loads when you are in the directory it
describes:
packages/core/CLAUDE.md 694 domain modules, fn(), actor, errors, auth
apps/api/CLAUDE.md 284 routes, registration, error flow
docs/alchemy.md 345 stages, bindings, secrets, the CLI
CLAUDE.md 72 the repo, both toolchains, two hard rules
Nothing was rewritten or dropped — the three files are the original text,
verified identical after the split. What the root file now carries is only what
is true repo-wide: the layout, the commands, where the detail lives, and the two
rules that are not style preferences. One of those is that nothing closed may
enter this repo, which is here because it has already been caught once.
The README described a streaming platform in four bullets and did not mention
that half the repository is Rust that runs inside a virtual machine. It now says
what each component does, why a micro-VM rather than a container, what is
deliberately absent, and what decides whether a thing is open — data is, capacity
is not.
It also says plainly that this is mid-rewrite and the docs are behind. Someone
arriving at a repo whose documentation does not match its tree should be told
that by the README rather than discover it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
