plainpages/AGENTS.md

AGENTS.md

Guidance for AI agents and contributors working in this repo. Read README.md for commands and layout.

Maintaining this file

Every agent session reads this file in full, so its length is a cost paid on every task. Keep it the shortest thing that still changes what someone does.

• Trim as you add. After any edit, re-read the whole file and compress: merge overlapping entries, cut prose that restates a rule, drop what the code or README.md already says. Question each section — same information, fewer words.
• Record the decision and the reason it turns on, nothing else. Not the investigation, not what was tried first, not how it was verified — that belongs in the PR that made the change.
• Give every accepted risk an expiry ("valid while X"), and delete the entry once X stops holding.
• One home per fact. Link to it rather than restating it — the same sentence in five files is five things to update and five chances to drift.

How to work with tasks

Use the file todo.md.

For each todo item, interview the user extensively to deeply understand the scope and goal of each. When done, check the completed task in todo.md. Commit all changes and push to a new branch, create a PR and merge it when the CI/CD turns green.

Project priorities (do not erode)

1. Simplicity — prefer the solution that is easiest to understand, smallest, and most readable.
2. Few dependencies — runtime deps stay minimal (today ejs, lucide-static, @larvit/log). Prefer the Node standard library; justify any new dependency; do not add frameworks. The app is stateless — no database. Auth/identity/OAuth are Ory sidecar services (Kratos/Keto/Hydra, backed by Postgres), reached over their REST APIs with built-in fetch — no SDK. New capabilities ship as plugin folders under plugins/ that fetch their data from upstream services, not as core code.
3. Strict TypeScript — tsconfig.json is strict (incl. noUncheckedIndexedAccess, exactOptionalPropertyTypes, verbatimModuleSyntax). Keep it that way. Prefer exact types; limit nullable and multi-option types.
4. Environment-agnostic — the app never asks which environment it runs in; no NODE_ENV branching. Every behaviour is an explicit config toggle (e.g. CACHE_TEMPLATES, REQUIRE_SECURE_SECRETS), read once in src/config.ts. Compose files set them per deployment.
5. Semantic, accessible DOM — use the right element for the job (landmarks, one <h1> per page
   • sane heading order, lists, <table> with row/column headers, <fieldset>/<legend>, <button> vs <a>); add ARIA only to fill real gaps (aria-current, aria-sort, labels). Classes/ids name meaning, not looks. Prefer native semantics over div + ARIA. New views and partials keep this bar.
6. Full, parallel E2E — every user-facing flow (each page, form, guard, plugin route) has a Playwright E2E test, shipped in the same change as the surface. Tests stay independent and side-effect-free so the suite runs fullyParallel — never serialise on shared state.
7. Powerful, fail-loud plugins — the plugin API is the product's main surface and the only way to add domain features. It optimises for being powerful, predictable, and overloadable (a plugin can take over as much of a page as it wants), and the host fails loud at boot/discovery (bad manifest, version mismatch, conflict) rather than sandboxing at runtime. Runtime crash-isolation is a deliberate non-goal — diagnose at deploy time, not in production.

Deliberate architectural deviations (don't re-flag)

Intentional, reasoned choices — an architecture review should honor them, not re-raise them. Revisit only if the stated reason stops holding.

Structure & contracts

• src/ is grouped by concern, not flat — http/ (request pipeline), auth/ (session-JWT hot path, guards, Ory REST clients), i18n/ (locale resolution + catalogs), plugin-host/ (discovery/router/hooks/view-resolver + the plugin-api.ts author barrel + system.ts behind ctx.system), ui/ (design-system view-models + menu/chrome). server.ts/config.ts/logger.ts and the topology-guard *.test.ts stay at the root; tests are co-located. Add a new module to the folder owning its concern; don't reintroduce a flat tree. The core ships no domain screens — even the admin GUI is a drop-in plugin (examples/plugins/admin/).
• Plugins and config import the host only via package.json imports — #plugin-api → src/plugin-host/plugin-api.ts, #menu-config → src/ui/menu-config.ts, never a relative ../../src/* path. These two barrels are the whole contract surface; the src/* behind them may be refactored freely. Don't "fix" a #-import back to a relative path. Two consequences:
  • #plugin-api re-exports the Ory client types (KratosAdmin/KetoClient/HydraAdmin + their DTOs and error classes), so those shapes are contract-visible — changing them needs a major apiVersion bump, not a free refactor.
  • A plugin/config folder must stay a plain folder — no package.json of its own, which would become its own scope and stop #-specifiers resolving. A plugin kept in its own repo therefore typechecks against the barrel only when mounted under the host tree (or with a vendored stub).
• examples/ mirrors the drop-in mount dirs — examples/plugins/<id>/ copies to plugins/<id>/, examples/config/menu.ts to config/menu.ts. Both mirrors are in tsconfig.include and resolve the host via #-imports, so each typechecks in place and copies across unchanged. Never commit real plugins/config into the root mount dirs — they ship empty.
• ctx.chrome is lazily memoized — do not make it unconditional or move it into the base request context. It protects the I/O-free hot path on the public, bot-hit landing (/). (Declined twice.)
• A plugin-owned render always runs on that plugin's context. The landing slots (home, dashboard) and an onRequest short-circuit build their context with contextFor(pluginId) exactly as a plugin route does — otherwise ctx.t is the core translator and the plugin's own keys render as bare keys on the pages it owns.
• Email is delegated to Kratos (it renders + sends recovery/verification mail); web never touches SMTP. Customization is Kratos' courier.template_override_path, not app code — keeping web stateless and dependency-light.

Authorization

• Vocabulary: User → Group → Permission, and there is no Role. Keto ships no namespaces — all four in ory/keto/namespaces.keto.ts are ours. A permission is one operation ("read shifts"); a role is a bundle, which here is just a group with several grants (groups nest). Ory's own "permission" (the Resource permits: view/edit/delete) is the separate per-row tier.
• A permission name is always <resource>:<action> — scheduling:read, users:write. A bare word names who someone is (a role), and roles are groups here; the old catch-all admin was exactly that mistake. Enforced at discovery (isValidPermissionName in plugin-host/plugin.ts, checked by shapeError over every route/nav permission and every declared name), fail-loud like any other manifest rule — not only in the admin GUI, which an operator removes by not copying it in.
  • Names are authored in plugin code; only grants live in Keto. The host collects every installed plugin's declarations into one catalog (declaredPermissions → ctx.declaredPermissions), and that catalog is the list the admin screens offer. Hence no Permissions admin screen: nothing in a GUI invents a name, and holding one is a property of a user or group, edited as a checkbox list there. A Keto tuple naming something no installed plugin declares gates nothing, is not offered, and is never revoked by an unrelated save — the picker only speaks for what it showed.
  • <resource> is global, not plugin-scoped (hence oauth2-clients, not clients): users are the host's, and cross-plugin sharing is a goal. Cost: collision-freedom is a convention rather than structural. Accepted — the alternative penalizes the sharing case.
  • Declaring a permission stays optional. Mandatory declaration would let findConflicts see all overlaps, but would then warn on exactly that legitimate sharing case. Shape is enforced; declaration is not.
  • ADMIN_PERMISSIONS defaults to empty (every permission is owned by the plugin gating on it), and an unusable value is dropped with a warning, never fatal — fail-loud belongs at the manifest boundary where a developer authored the mistake, whereas bootstrap gates web, so refusing operator env takes the whole stack down. e2e-tests/compose.auth.yml seeds a bad value so the container proves it survives one. The seed is a function of what bootstrap discovers, so a plugin dropped in after first boot needs docker compose up -d (re-runs the one-shot), not restart web. bootstrap's matching ./plugins mount belongs in compose.override.yml and nowhere else: in the base file it would desynchronise prod and collide with the e2e stacks, which bind individual plugins inside /app/plugins (a nested mount into a read-only parent is EROFS and the container never starts). Valid while bootstrap is the only writer of grants.
  • actionForMethod is plugin-local and must not migrate into #plugin-api. Inside the admin example it keeps the route table and the in-handler guard deriving from one function, so 29 routes × 2 gate sites cannot drift. Generalised, it would make authorization a function of the transport verb — a route table must answer "what does this need?" on its own.
• A :read-only holder must never be shown a write affordance. The list/detail models carry canWrite and the views drop create/save/delete/add/remove; the permission picker still renders, disabled, because seeing who holds what is the point of :read. A write-intent GET (a create form, a delete-confirm page) is the exception to actionForMethod and gates on :write, since a page whose only purpose is to start a write should refuse a reader rather than render a form whose submit 403s. Two grant-specific guards go with it: you cannot revoke your own direct grants (self-lockout would need a curl against Keto to undo), and a permission held through a group renders ticked-but-disabled, because unticked stated the opposite of the truth. Known gap: the group paths are unguarded — unticking a permission on a group you belong to, leaving it, or deleting it can still strip your own access. The robust "last effective holder" check needs a reverse Keto query and is deferred.
• users:write and groups:write are equivalent to full administrative access: groups:write adds you to any group, including one holding every permission; users:write mints a recovery code for any account. The containment the split buys is real on the read half only (users:read is a safe helpdesk grant). Don't let the per-resource naming imply otherwise in docs.
• Plainpages says "user" everywhere; Ory's word is "identity". Ory's own docs use the terms interchangeably, so this is house style, not a renamed concept. The single exception is the Identity DTO in src/auth/kratos-admin.ts, which mirrors Kratos' wire shape — don't rename it.

i18n

• The locale lives in the URL, never in a cookie. ?locale=sv-SE → Accept-Language → en-US, and when the URL asked for one the host carries it onto the links it renders. A cookie would make a page's language invisible in its address and unshareable; the cost is that a plugin wraps its own hrefs. Matching is exact on a full tag (sv-FI ≠ sv-SE), except that a lone language from Accept-Language takes the first regional catalog for it.
• The core building blocks carry the locale; a plugin doesn't have to. The shell (breadcrumbs), pagination, filter-bar, data-table, auth-card, flow-body, field and menu wrap every href in localeHref; nav and sign-in are wrapped in chrome.ts; the two GET forms carry it as a hidden locale input, since a GET submit replaces the whole query string. A form's action counts as a link — sign-out, consent and auth-card forms carry it too, or picking a language and then saving anything drops back to Accept-Language. Putting the obligation on each call site was tried and missed five of eight sites in one commit. ctx.localeHref remains for hrefs a plugin's own markup emits. The one round-trip that cannot carry it is the Kratos sign-in POST (absolute off-site URL).
• locale is a host-owned query param — in parseListQuery's reserved set, so a localized list page doesn't hand a plugin a phantom locale filter. The i18n view locals (t, locale, locales, localeHref, localeParam, localeSwitch, dir) are likewise reserved, merged after a handler's data so a collision loses the key instead of breaking the shell.
• Catalogs are checked at boot, not at render. Every locale is compared against its set's en-US — keys, string-vs-plural kind, and the plural categories Intl.PluralRules requires — and a mismatch stops startup. A plugin may ship fewer locales than the host (its strings fall back to en-US per key), never one the host lacks.
• locales/ at the repo root is a drop-in mount, like plugins/ and config/ — locales/<tag>.ts for the core, locales/plugins/<id>/<tag>.ts for a plugin; a new tag adds a language, an existing one replaces that catalog wholesale. Adding a language must never require forking the image. The SHIPPED en-US stays the parity baseline even when the mount replaces it, so a mounted catalog is checked rather than trusted (one compared only against itself would boot green with the whole UI rendering keys).
• The language picker is on every page, POST-rendered ones included. A POST-rendered URL often answers no GET (POST /admin/users/:id/recovery), so the host resolves the picker's target (app.ts → switchBase): this path when it answers GET, else the same-origin Referer, else /. Accepted cost: switching language there leaves that POST's own result behind. Valid while the picker is expected on literally every page — if that softens, hiding it after a POST is simpler.
• An unknown translation key renders as itself. That single rule lets a nav label, branding, or a menu rename be either a key or plain text without a second field or a migration. Don't "fix" it into a loud failure: a manifest with plain labels must keep working.
• t() returns raw text; the view escapes it. Messages go through <%= %> like any other value; one carrying markup uses <%- %>, and then its {{vars}} are escaped at the call site. Don't move escaping into t() — every other value in a view would become the odd one out.
• RTL is out of scope until there is a real use case. textDirection sets <html dir> because that is free and correct, but the stylesheet keeps physical left/right properties; a genuine RTL locale needs those moved to logical ones first. Don't convert the CSS or file findings about it on spec. Valid while no deployment needs an RTL language.

UI

• A dropdown is a <button popovertarget> + [popover], never a <details>. The browser then owns open/close — the only zero-JS way to dismiss by clicking outside — and the panel sits in the top layer, so a row kebab is no longer clipped by .table-wrap's overflow. Four rules hold it together: the panel carries position-anchor: auto (a bare anchor() resolves to nothing in all three engines); it stays the trigger's next sibling inside the .menu wrapper, which the open-state style and the old-browser fallback both read; the partial requires a caller-named id and fails loud without one, since that is the popovertarget idref (generated ids were tried and rejected — nondeterministic HTML forecloses the caching decision); and neither aria-expanded nor aria-haspopup is written, because a zero-JS invoker cannot keep the first truthful and the second would promise role="menu" semantics these panels don't implement. <details> stays where it means disclosure rather than popup: the nav tree. shell.ejs hand-rolls the same block for the profile menu (its trigger composes escaped user values and its one item is a CSRF POST form, neither of which the partial's Item shapes cover) — keep the two in step.
• ICON_NAMES (src/ui/icons.ts) is a host-owned registry, not a frozen plugin contract. It is deliberately not re-exported from #plugin-api; README → Nav & permission gates tells an author that a new icon means registering it there. So the palette may narrow when the last reference to an id goes, and a plugin needing one gets it re-registered in the same change. Accepted cost: an unknown sprite id renders blank instead of failing loud (the every icon <use> resolves e2e test catches anything reaching the nav). Removing an id is a core edit — weigh it per icon rather than sweeping.

Build, test & release

• Deps install to /node_modules, above WORKDIR /app — Node resolves upward, so dev's .:/app bind mount has nothing to shadow. Not a volume at /app/node_modules: the daemon creates a mount destination as root whatever --user says, leaving a root-owned dir in the checkout. Nothing may sit at that path now — it shadows /node_modules silently (src/compose.test.ts guards the compose files, .dockerignore the image).
• Anything the browser logs fails the E2E test that provoked it. Every spec takes its test from e2e-tests/console-guard.ts, which fails a test on a console error/warning or uncaught exception on any page it opened. A zero-JS app has nothing to say in the console, so the bar is zero rather than a curated tolerance list; the two exceptions are narrow — a module-level allowance for the COOP header Chromium drops (the e2e stacks serve plain http over container hostnames), and allowConsole(re) for a test whose own page provokes a message on purpose. src/e2e-console-guard.test.ts locks the wiring in the unit gate, since a spec importing test straight from Playwright — or minting a page with a raw newPage() instead of watchedPage() — would run unwatched and green. The buffer clears at teardown so a beforeAll is watched too; accepted cost is that a page outliving its test can log late and fail the next one.
• The Ory-free specs run in all three engines; the Ory-backed ones stay on Chromium. visual.spec.ts + language.spec.ts are side-effect-free, so parallel runs don't collide, and a console message only appears in the engine that renders the page (ORY_FREE in e2e-tests/playwright.config.ts). The rest write users, groups and sessions to one shared backend, so widening them means a stack per engine. Screenshots are written per project name.
• The docs-only CI skip is *.md anywhere in the tree, not just the root. No test, build step or workflow reads a markdown file, so a nested examples/plugins/admin/README.md edit is as safe to skip as README.md. Both git channels in ci.sh's docs_only() pass --no-renames: rename detection names only the destination, so git mv src/app.ts notes.md otherwise read as docs and skipped the gate over a source file that was gone. src/ci-gate.test.ts locks the flags as a text guard — the test image ships neither git nor bash. Revisit if a .md ever becomes load-bearing.
• CI docker logins share the runner host's Docker config. The act_runner is host-mode, so docker login/logout in the workflows mutate one shared ~/.docker/config.json: concurrent jobs can race (one job's logout can 401 another's push — recover by re-running), and tokens sit in that file between login and logout. Same class: concurrent runs share the workspace dir, so ci.sh's web-image build races another run's container creation on the <project>-web tag. Accepted for a single-maintainer cadence; serialize with a workflow concurrency group if it ever bites.
• Plainpages is pre-announcement: no tags, no releases. All tags and semver container tags were deleted, and auto-release is gated behind the AUTO_RELEASE Actions variable (unset ⇒ skipped, the fail-safe direction on every unknown-vars path). A version only communicates to consumers and there are none — the same reasoning that freezes HOST_API_VERSION. Two couplings: registry-cleanup keeps a hash image only while its commit is a branch head or release-tagged, so with zero tags a hand-cut tag must sit on main's tip; and mirror.yml pushes tags with --prune (so its fetch-tags: true is load-bearing), meaning a tag or Release created on GitHub is swept away and releases are cut on Gitea only. Valid until the maintainer says Plainpages is ready to show people.
• A stricter manifest rule breaks already-copied plugins, and while HOST_API_VERSION is frozen the failure names a symptom rather than the cause. plugins/ is an operator-owned drop-in mount, so an operator's copy is whatever version they took. checkApiVersion is the right mechanism — a breaking manifest change bumps the major and a stale plugin is refused by version — but that only works once the freeze lifts. Until then a stricter rule ships with a README → Upgrading entry and a re-copy hint in the discovery error. Fail-loud stays right either way: the alternative is a route gating on a name nobody can be granted, i.e. a permanent silent 403. Valid while HOST_API_VERSION stays frozen.

Docker only — no host tooling

Everything (install, typecheck, test, run, build, deploy) goes through Docker / Docker Compose. Never run node, npm, or tsc on the host.

docker compose up                                       # dev server, live reload
docker compose run --rm --no-deps web npm run typecheck  # strict type check (--no-deps: skip Ory)
docker compose run --rm --no-deps web npm test           # tests
docker compose -f compose.yml up --build -d              # production

README structure (keep it this way)

README.md serves two readers, in this order — preserve it when editing:

1. First-time reader (top). A one/two-sentence tagline, then a Quick start that gets the stack up and a minimal plugin live. Nothing comes before Quick start — no philosophy, no rationale. Keep its commands copy-pasteable; deeper detail lives in its own section, linked.
2. Returning developer (rest). A Contents ToC right after Quick start, then sections ordered by what an adopter reaches for first, not by architectural layering: Overview → Users, groups & permissions → Building plugins → menu/blocks/interactivity → Configuration → Auth → Email → Architecture → Testing → Production → Observability → JWT-rotation runbook → Project-layout file map → Extending. Place a new section by how early an adopter needs it. Users, groups & permissions precedes Building plugins because a manifest's permission: gate is unreadable without the model, and it is the one home for that model.

When editing: put content in the section it belongs to; keep the ToC in sync when you add/rename/ remove an H2/H3; state each fact in one home and link to it.

Don't document internals here. How a script reaches a decision, what a function guards — a developer can read that off the code in seconds, and it only makes the README longer for humans and machines alike. It belongs in the code, or nowhere. The README earns its length on what you cannot dig out: how to use and operate Plainpages, the external contracts, and one-time setup. Same test before adding a row to a table or the file map — a clause, not a paragraph.

Rules

• Node 24 runs .ts directly (type stripping). Keep all TypeScript erasable (erasableSyntaxOnly is on): no enum, namespace, parameter properties, or decorators. Import local modules with their .ts extension.
• No .mjs. Write modules as .ts — even standalone scripts run in bare node:24 containers (the e2e mock servers, examples/shifts-upstream/server.ts). If a file genuinely must be plain JavaScript, use .js; "type": "module" is set in both package.jsons, so .js is ESM.
• No build step and no compiled artifacts — do not add a bundler or tsc emit.
• Before finishing a change, run the typecheck and tests above; both must pass.
• Tests use the built-in node --test runner — no test framework dependency.
• English everywhere. Keep code comments short and information-dense; self-explained code with no comment at all is preferred.
• Do not comment about history ("this moved from X"), or about the absence of things.
• Pin all dependencies and Docker images to exact, human-readable semantic versions — never ranges (^, ~) and never digests. npm deps via .npmrc (save-exact=true) + npm ci; images by tag.
• HOST_API_VERSION is frozen at 1.0.0 until the first external install, even for additive contract changes. With no third-party plugin in the wild a bump can only produce noise. The promotion trigger is the first external plugin — from then on follow the versioning table in README → Contract versioning. The frozen surface includes views/partials/*.ejs: the view resolver makes every core partial an include() root for a plugin's views, so their option names and emitted markup are author-visible. Know the hole that leaves — discovery fails loud on a bad apiVersion, but include("menu", { open: true }) silently ignores a dropped option. Promotion must cover the partial vocabulary too.
• A plugin's apiVersion is a hand-written literal semver — the host version it was built against — bumped by hand on rebuild, never the host's HOST_API_VERSION constant. Importing the constant makes every plugin always equal the host, so checkApiVersion can never fire.
• Plugin route handlers are thin and per-route, keyed on ctx.params. Register one handler per {method, path} in the manifest (the host extracts :id/:name and 404s malformed %-encoding). Don't funnel many routes into one dispatcher that re-parses ctx.url.pathname: it duplicates the URL shape, ignores the router's params, and has to re-handle HEAD. Factor shared per-request setup into a small withX wrapper — see examples/plugins/admin/.
• handleRequest (src/http/app.ts) is a known complexity hotspot — ~160 lines tracking canonical host, static, locale, session + re-mint, CSRF, chrome, hooks, plugin routing, builtin routing, 405/404 and error mapping. The pure parts are already extracted and separately tested; what remains is orchestration. Planned split along those seams; don't grow it further without taking one out.
• Reviews are maintainer-triggered (e.g. via the larv-review skill) — never auto-run reviewer agents.
• A user-visible string belongs in a catalog, not in the code or a view. Core strings go in src/i18n/locales/en-US.ts (then every other locale, or the boot fails); a plugin's go in its own i18n/. Operator/developer-facing text — boot errors, log messages, guard messages — stays English. A pure view-model builder takes an optional t defaulting to its own English, so a unit test reads in words; handlers pass ctx.t.
• One verb per action in the English UI: sign in, sign out, create account. Not "log in", "log out" or "sign up", inflections included — a second spelling for one button reads as a second thing; the noun ("a sign-in error") is unaffected. A plugin's catalog and every other locale follow the same rule in their own language. An unmapped Kratos id renders Kratos' own wording — map the id when it matters. Held by the author, never by a test: slightly different wording is often the right call, and a build-failing check takes that judgment away.
• Use well formed, standard compliant, rich URIs. Prefer state in the URL over POSTing it, for example on list pages with filters and pagination. Do ids=x&ids=y, not ids[]=x&ids[]=y and not ids=x,y.