peter
58ad95263c
The never-activated rule left one order of events open: on an instance without SMTP, a stranger who registered an ADMIN_EMAILS address (or a sibling spelling) and was then activated by another admin kept their password and live session, and the owner's first Google sign-in raised that row to admin, the stranger's cookie with it. Activation vouches for access, not for who chose the password, and without SMTP nothing else ever proved the mailbox. When ADMIN_EMAILS promotes an adopted account that holds a password on an instance without SMTP, the password goes and the session epoch is bumped. With SMTP the verified flag is a proven mailbox, and an account the sign-in does not promote keeps its password, so the "your password was cleared" detour stays off the default path. Tests: the activated squat (red without the rule; the squatter's session is signed out) and the SMTP case that keeps the password.
Backend conventions
The rules below are already followed across backend/app — they lived only in a few module
docstrings (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/,issues/— 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;issues/bundle.pyis the one definition of a bug report's files, for the zip export and the tracker. -
Flat
app/*.pycore modules — cross-cutting primitives.auth,sysconfig,quota,audit,notifications,userscope,ratelimit,progress,logs(the one logging configuration),logsink(itslog_eventstable),diagnostics(a user's consented log level),debugsession(a recording that tags its user's lines, E16) andcollation(A→Z in the reader's alphabet, E30), … 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 + basedpyright (backend) · the lock check + tsc ×3 + eslint + prettier + knip +
vite build (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; a missing database is a hard failure, not a silent skip, unless a hand run asks
for pure-logic only with SIFTLODE_TEST_REQUIRE_DB=0. See docs/development.md, and docs/gates.md
for what each gate deliberately leaves out.