peter
563fa0513d
Eleven findings survived adversarial verification; these are the fixes.
**Address pre-emption.** S1 dropped the approval-time password revoke, arguing `password_login`
refuses an unverified account before it reads `is_active`. Two verifiers showed that holds only
while the address stays unverified — and S6's approval mail exists to get the real owner to end that
state, at which point the squatter's password works. While an address is unverified the NEWEST
registration now owns it: the password is replaced and every outstanding verify token deleted, so
the owner takes the row back simply by registering, and a link already in flight cannot confirm it
for anyone else. The residual (an owner who confirms and neither registers nor resets) is logged as
SEC-16 beside SEC-15, where the re-attestation path it needs already lives. The comments that
asserted the old, false invariant now say what actually guards this.
**The entry URL.** S2 moved `clearEntryUrl()` out of the signed-out auth card into a hook App mounts
unconditionally, and it blanket-stripped the whole query string, the fragment and `history.state` on
the FIRST commit. That broke first-run setup outright — the wizard mounts only after its query
resolves and then finds no `?token=` — and silently ate `?link=`/`?oauth=` (no toast, no refetch
after connecting Google), `?v=`/`?chan=` deep links, and scroll restoration. It now clears only the
fragment and the two one-time flags it owns, and preserves `history.state`.
**The env allow-list.** S3 canonicalised the Invite branch of `is_allowed` and left the
ALLOWED_EMAILS/ADMIN_EMAILS fallback matching literally — the 2026-09-03 lockout with a different
source of truth, plus a shadowing trick where an unauthenticated request under a sibling spelling
permanently masked an env grant. Canonical on both sides now, and the same for the delete dialog's
warning and the ADMIN_EMAILS role bootstrap.
**Honest states.** `send_invitation` stamped "I already wrote to them" before a fail-soft background
send; it sends inline and records only what left. The admin-side resend answered `{ok: true}` for a
dropped mail; it now says so. Both also activate/serialize consistently with the other decide paths.
**Correctness sweep.** The 7-day approval link said "expires in 168 hours" — durations render in
days once there is more than one. `_register_account`, `upsert_pending_invite` and `add_invite`
picked among canonical siblings with no ORDER BY and no exact-spelling tie-break, so which account
got the re-send, and whether a denied row was reopened over a pending one, was up to Postgres.
`purge_user` deleted every canonically-equal invite, revoking a surviving sibling account's access.
`ConfirmProvider` wrapped its ReactNode message in a `<p>`. Approving no longer leaves the
stuck-sign-ups list stale. The refusal panels announce and take focus.
**Tests.** Three mailers rewritten this epic never rendered in any test; every `send_*` now renders
in both languages. The orphan-key guard could not fail (it scanned the catalog that defines the
keys) and had no reverse direction. Newly pinned: canonical activation, the surviving sibling's
grant, a failed invitation and resend, an expired reset link, a throttled login's silence, the
per-language admin fan-out, and that the entry URL keeps what it does not own.
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.