114 exception handlers neither logged nor re-raised. The defect was never that
they are silent — plenty of them should be — it is that their silence said
nothing, so nobody could tell a decision from an oversight. Each one has now been
read. 44 got a line; the other 70 carry `# silent-ok: <why>`.
What the silent ones had been hiding, in the cases that got a line:
- A failed ffprobe sent every HDR file down the 8-bit pipeline, so playback
degraded to a software transcode with nothing saying why; a failed audio probe
collapsed a multi-audio file to one track and the player showed no language
picker; a failed first-PTS probe left subtitles seconds out of sync.
- A subtitle sidecar that existed but would not parse made a PARTIAL track read as
complete, permanently — the viewer loses every cue past the cached window.
- An unreadable crop/trim/cut-list in an edit spec was dropped, so the clip came
out uncropped, untrimmed, or shorter than the one the user built.
- A dropped `max_height` downloaded at best quality against an explicit cap.
- A failed videos.list enrich made every candidate undroppable-from-judgement and
therefore dropped: a working search rendered as "no results".
- An unusable password hash answered as "wrong password", locking the owner out
and telling them they mistyped; a rotated TOKEN_ENCRYPTION_KEY turned every
stored token into "not connected".
- A stored admin setting that would not coerce fell back to the env default while
the settings page went on showing the saved value.
- A one-off InnerTube config failure pinned the whole process to the hard-coded
fallback key, and searches return nothing when that goes stale.
- The HLS sweep reported 0 swept — like a clean run — when it could not list its
own root, leaving every crashed session's segments on disk forever.
Four of them are counted rather than logged per item (dropped cues, dropped cut
list segments, unreclaimed GC files) and reported once per call, because the
alternative is one line per cue over a whole subtitle track.
ruff gains S110 and BLE001. Every blind `except Exception` that remains carries
`# noqa: BLE001 — <why>`, which is the point: catching everything is sometimes
right, and always worth a sentence. plex/sync.py's three best-effort backfill
catches now keep the traceback — a blind catch over a batch that fetches AND
writes could be Plex, the database or our own bug, and `%s` of the exception told
them apart badly. main.py's boot-time log-level read likewise.
logs.event's `code` is positional-only now: `event("x", code=...)` was a TypeError,
and `code` is exactly the word a caller reaches for when the thing that failed has
one of its own.
tests/test_swallowed_exceptions.py is the wider rule ruff cannot see: a handler
that neither logs nor re-raises must say why. Both cases mutation-checked — a
marker removed and a log line removed each fail it, naming the handler.
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,logs(the one logging configuration),logsink(itslog_eventstable) anddiagnostics(a user's consented log level), … 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.