Twelve mails carried hardcoded English while the app itself has enforced HU/EN parity since E5.
A mail is the one user-facing surface nobody can re-render by switching the UI language: it arrives
once, in whatever language we picked, and stays that way. That made the epic's own headline mail —
"one mail, one click" — English for a Hungarian reader.
The text moved to a catalog (`mailtext.py`) with a `text(key, lang, **vars)` renderer, and the parity
rule is now a test rather than a habit: every key must carry both languages AND the same
`{placeholders}`. A translation that drops `{link}` sends a mail with no link in it; one that invents
a placeholder raises inside a background task nobody is watching. Both are silent in production.
Every `send_*` takes the language as its second argument, resolved by the REQUEST handler and never
inside the mail — these all run as background tasks, after the request's session is gone, which is
the same reason the approval mail computes its link in the handler.
Where the language comes from, in order: the account's own preference; failing that, the language the
person asked us in; failing that, English. The middle one is new — `invites.lang`, migration `0082` —
because the mails an access request produces go to an address that usually has no account yet, and
the signal does exist: the page their form was submitted from, or the locale Google reported for a
sign-in we refused. Captured rather than derived, for the third time in this epic (`google_email` in
S3, `preferences.language` in S6 taught the same lesson): a signal that exists only in one moment
cannot be backfilled later. So the admin is asked in exactly one place — the invitation to an address
they typed in themselves, where nobody has ever told us anything.
That send is now a dialog rather than a bare click, which is also where the "you already wrote to
them" warning belongs — it used to live only in a tooltip the admin may never hover, guarding the one
action whose failure mode is mailing a real person twice.
S6's registration `lang` field turned out to be dead on arrival: the backend accepted it, the
frontend never sent it, so every account has been storing nothing. The request builders now stamp the
UI language themselves — a signal that has to be passed in by every caller is one every caller can
forget, which is exactly how it shipped unset.
Admins are notified one mail per language group instead of one blast to everyone. They are people
with their own UI language; a single message would have to pick one of them and be wrong for the rest.
Also removes a duplicated `invited_at` column declaration on `Invite` (two identical definitions
landed in S6).
Backend conventions
The rules below are already followed across backend/app — they lived only in a few module
docstrings (demo.py, userscope.py, routes/_common.py) until this file collected them (E3 S3,
B-core-20). When you add code, match these so the next reader doesn't have to guess "which pattern do
I copy".
Module layering
Three layers, by who runs the code — not by feature:
-
routes/…— request-only. A route module holds HTTP concerns: auth dependencies, request/ response models, status-code mapping, serialization. It owns logic that runs only on a request. Business logic that a request happens to trigger does not live here if anything else runs it too. -
plex/,downloads/,sync/— domain logic shared by more than one caller. Anything the scheduler or the worker runs (not just a request) lives in one of these domain packages, so the route, the worker, and the scheduler share one definition. Examples from this codebase:downloads/service.pyowns enqueue + the job state transitions (routes call it);plex/sync.pyis run by both the admin route and the scheduler;downloads/pipeline.pyis the worker's child pipeline. -
Flat
app/*.pycore modules — cross-cutting primitives.auth,sysconfig,quota,audit,notifications,userscope,realtime,ratelimit,progress, … are single-file primitives many layers import. They depend on nothing above them (a core module must never import aroutes/…module).
Extraction trigger: the SECOND consumer. Keep new logic inline in its first caller. The moment a second caller needs it (a worker as well as a route; a scheduler as well as a route), extract it down a layer — into the relevant domain package, or a flat core module if it's cross-cutting. Don't pre-abstract for a single caller; don't leave shared logic duplicated once there are two.
Transaction ownership
This follows CLAUDE.md's canonical rule verbatim — "the handler/job-wrapper commits; helpers flush
(only quota owns its session)" — so read it that way, not as an exception to it. The commit belongs
to the operation owner; anything called inside another transaction only stages its change
(db.add / flush) and lets the owner commit, so the whole operation is one transaction.
audit.record() is the reference: it adds the audit row and the caller commits it together with the
mutation it records, so an audit entry can never exist without its change (or vice-versa).
- The operation owner is usually the route handler. A
service.*operation the handler delegates a whole transition to (e.g.service.cancel) is that owner and commits its one transition — it isn't a mid-operation helper. A helper that owns its OWN short-lived session (the worker'sjobdbwrites, the same carve-out CLAUDE.md grantsquota) commits that session. Everything else flushes. SessionLocalisexpire_on_commit=False: after a rawUPDATE+ commit, an ORM object you already loaded is stale. Read the fresh value from the row (RETURNING, or a re-SELECT), not the ORM attribute — seeservice.decr_ref_count.
Shared counters and status: do it atomically at the DB
- Never read-modify-write a shared counter in Python (
x.count = x.count + 1). Concurrent sessions lose an update. Use a DB-atomic statement —col = col + 1, orgreatest(col - 1, 0)withRETURNINGso the caller branches on the post-value under the row lock (service.incr_ref_count/decr_ref_count). - Download job status is a
JobStatusStrEnum (downloads/status.py), not bare strings. TheHOLDINGset defines which states hold aMediaAsset(so release accounting stays correct);STOPPED_BY_ROUTEis the route-initiated stop set. A worker child's terminal write goes throughservice.finalize_if_running(an atomicUPDATE … WHERE status='running') so a finishing child can't resurrect a job a route just stopped.
Config: one home per kind
app.config.settings— boot/env config (DB URL, download root, worker concurrency): read once at startup, not user-tunable at runtime.sysconfig.SPECS— the runtime admin knobs (DB-override-or-default). A new admin-tunable value goes inSPECS; don't invent a fourth store. (state.py'smaintenance_batchpredates this and is slated to fold intosysconfig— do not add more like it.)
The gate
Everything below must be green before a change is done (run via siftlode check):
ruff (backend) · tsc ×3 + eslint + prettier + knip (frontend) · vitest · pytest. The
pytest lane runs in backend/docker-compose.test.yml — an ephemeral Postgres + the backend tree
bind-mounted — so the DB-backed integration tests (the db fixture) actually run; SIFTLODE_TEST_ REQUIRE_DB=1 there turns a would-be silent skip into a hard failure. See docs/development.md.