docs(decisions): Crafty sign-in handoff — the gate was fine, the local login was the wall
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Records what refused (Crafty's own 401, not oauth2-proxy), that the existing
bootstrap credential is still live (users.last_update == users.created), the
separate cookie-name collision fixed alongside, the traps measured rather
than assumed, the default.json seeding approach considered and rejected with
the entrypoint `ls -A` landmine that kills it, and — plainly — that no browser
round-trip was performed and the gate was rc 3, not green.

Written as its OWN FILE under decisions/ rather than appended to the tail of
DECISIONS-LOG.md. The single-file append is what made this PR (#22) and three
others unmergeable on 2026-09-29: every branch collided on the same last hunk,
with DECISIONS-LOG.md the only conflicting path in all four. The one-file-per-
entry layout and its ci/decisions-log.sh guard land in #24; this entry is
already written in that format, and validates against that checker (rc 0,
"1 entry well-formed"). This branch now touches DECISIONS-LOG.md not at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
This commit is contained in:
jakman85andClaude Opus 5 committed 2026-09-29 22:48:18 -05:00
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---
date: 2026-09-29
branch: fix/crafty-oauth2-proxy-signin
title: Crafty "won't sign in after Keycloak" — the gate was fine, Crafty's own login was the wall
---
## What changed
Reported as *"crafty utilizing the keycloak oauth2-proxy does not sign in to the service after
signing into keycloak; there is no way to set the service up without credentials."* The sidecar's
own access log settles which layer refused, and it is not the one the report names:
GET / -> 302 to Keycloak
[AuthSuccess] ... groups:[platform-admins] <- oauth2-proxy did its job
GET /oauth2/callback -> 302
GET /panel/dashboard -> 302
GET /login?next=/panel/dashboard -> 200 <- CRAFTY's own login page
POST /api/v2/auth/login/ -> 401 <- CRAFTY refused
**The Keycloak gate was never broken.** Crafty 4 has no OIDC and cannot consume the sidecar's
identity headers, so it presents its own local login to an already-authenticated user. That second
factor is intended. What was not intended — and what made the service genuinely impossible to set
up — is that **nothing documented where that password comes from**. Crafty generates it **once, on
first boot only** (users table empty → `DatabaseBuilder.default_settings()`) into
`/crafty/app/config/default-creds.txt`, mode `0600`, on the PVC's `config` subPath. Never in git; a
fresh PVC generates a new one and the old is gone with the volume. `platform/crafty/README.md`
asserted the double login was "expected, not a bug" and then left the reader with no way forward —
the assertion was true and useless in the same sentence.
So this branch:
- Adds `runbooks/crafty-admin-credential.md` — tell the two auth layers apart from the sidecar log,
retrieve and rotate the bootstrap credential, and reset a lost one via argon2. Registered in the
runbooks `configMapGenerator`/`kustomization.yaml` and listed in `runbooks/README.md`, so the URL
actually resolves rather than the file merely existing.
- Documents the credential's provenance and the two auth layers in `platform/crafty/README.md`.
- **Fixes a second, real defect found while proving the first.** Both oauth2-proxy instances emitted
oauth2-proxy's **default** cookie names (`_oauth2_proxy`, `_oauth2_proxy_csrf`) scoped to
`.home.keithjackson.dev`, while holding **different** cookie-secrets. One cookie pair, two
proxies: whichever authenticated last clobbered the other's session; the loser logged `No valid
authentication in request`, bounced to Keycloak, and — SSO session still live — was redirected
straight back, clobbering it again. **That mutual eviction presents exactly as the reported
symptom**, intermittently, and would have been blamed on Keycloak indefinitely. Fixed on the
crafty side only (renaming the shared proxy's cookie would sign out every other gated app): a
unique `--cookie-name=_oauth2_proxy_crafty` plus a **host-scoped** `--cookie-domain`.
`--whitelist-domain` stays zone-wide — it governs post-login *redirect* targets, not cookie scope.
**Considered and rejected: seeding `default.json` from a SOPS Secret.** Crafty does ship the hook —
`find_default_password()` reads `app/config/default.json` (`username`, `password`, min 8 chars) and
`delete_default_json` controls its removal — so an initContainer could make a rebuilt Crafty's admin
password deterministic and git-managed. Rejected: the image entrypoint pulls its default config
**only when `app/config` is empty** (`if [ ! "$(ls -A --ignore=.gitkeep ./app/config)" ]; then cp -r
./app/config_original/* ./app/config/`). Writing `default.json` there pre-boot makes the directory
non-empty and **suppresses the entire config bootstrap** — no `config.json`, no `credits.json`.
Doing it safely means replicating the entrypoint's copy inside the initContainer, i.e. co-owning
image-internal bootstrap logic that a 4.11 bump can change silently, to replace a one-command
retrieval. Not worth it. If it is ever revisited, the `ls -A` guard is the landmine to design around.
## What I verified
- **Which layer refused**, from the sidecar's own access log: `[AuthSuccess] ...
groups:[platform-admins]` followed by Crafty's `/login` page and `POST /api/v2/auth/login/ → 401`.
oauth2-proxy admitted the user; Crafty rejected the local credential.
- **The existing bootstrap credential is still usable**, so no DB surgery is needed to get in:
`users.last_update` **equals** `users.created` for `admin` (`09/05/2026, 08:10:04`) — the password
has never been changed — and admin's `last_login` is 09/14 from `127.0.0.1`, the API login that
created the "homelab" server. `default-creds.txt` is therefore live.
- **The two cookie-secrets differ** — compared the two live Secrets (key presence/values compared
in-cluster, not printed), so neither proxy can decrypt the other's cookie; and both instances were
emitting the default cookie names on the shared `.home.keithjackson.dev` scope.
- **The 3-strikes cooldown cannot fire behind this sidecar.** Crafty *records* failed attempts under
`get_remote_ip()` (honours `X-Forwarded-For` — the live tracker key is the chain
`"192.168.2.132, 10.0.0.123"`, with 1 attempt: the reported 401) but *checks* the cooldown under
`self.request.remote_ip`, always `127.0.0.1` here. The halves key differently, so
`get_recent_attempts()` always reads empty and `max_login_attempts: 3` never fires. Good
(**repeated guesses cannot lock the operator out**) and bad (that throttle is not a control we
have; the `platform-admins` gate is the only thing limiting who reaches the form). I had written
the opposite into the README from the config value alone before measuring it — the config key
existing is not the same claim as the code path running.
- **`set_passwd` is unreachable in k8s**: it calls `getpass.getpass()` and needs a TTY; the container
runs `main.py -d -i`. Recovery must go through the DB.
- **argon2 is installed only in `/crafty/.venv/bin/python`** — the system `python3` in that container
cannot import it, so the obvious reset one-liner fails.
- **`dev.sh` does not forward stdin.** A `kubectl exec -i` through it hangs forever (provoked, not
assumed). So the runbook's reset generates its password **in-pod** into a `0600` file — Crafty's own
`default-creds.txt` idiom — rather than passing a secret through argv, stdin or shell history.
- **Gate:** toolbox `./ci/gate.sh` — see the next section for the exit code. Green stages:
`spec-immutability`, `lint`, `l0`, `render-golden`, `l1`.
## What I did NOT verify
- **No browser round-trip.** The sign-in fix is **UNVERIFIED end-to-end**. The cookie change is
reasoned from measured facts (default cookie names on both, shared domain, differing secrets) and
renders correctly, but nobody has signed in through it. The human test is in
`platform/crafty/README.md`.
- **Nothing was applied.** No `kubectl apply/edit/patch`, no `flux reconcile`. The running pod is
still the pre-fix spec (`crafty-64f7b6d78-pkpgp`, 2/2, 15d, 0 restarts — unchanged by this
session's read-only probes). **Merging is what deploys, and it will restart the pod** —
`strategy: Recreate` on an RWO volume, so the "homelab" Minecraft server stops and restarts. Pick
the moment.
- **Gate rc 3, not 0.** Green: `spec-immutability`, `lint`, `l0`, `render-golden`, `l1`. **Skipped:**
`gitea-settings` (no `SETTINGS_API_TOKEN`) and **L2/L3 conformance** (`CLUSTER_AVAILABLE` unset) —
touched requirements `R-DNS-01 R-NET-01 R-OBS-04 R-PLAT-02 R-STATE-01` are **not certified**.
Nothing failed; nothing runtime was proven either. **rc 3 is UNDETERMINED, not green.**
- **The admin password was not rotated**, and the bootstrap credential is still the standing admin
credential. The runbook says to rotate on first sign-in; that is an operator action and is still
open.
- **The cookie collision's symptom was never reproduced in a browser.** This is the part of the
change with no observed failure to point at — the sidecar trace above shows a *working* session,
because that browser had not visited another gated app first. It is a latent-bug fix.
### Follow-ups
1. **Sign in and rotate** — `runbooks/crafty-admin-credential.md`, then confirm `last_update` moves
off `created`. Until then the panel's admin password is a value generated on 2026-09-05 that has
sat unchanged and undocumented.
2. **Decide whether the inert brute-force cooldown matters.** Fixing it is upstream (Crafty keys the
two halves differently); the alternative is to accept the `platform-admins` gate as the only
throttle and say so.
3. **Any further per-app reverse-proxy sidecar needs a unique `--cookie-name` too.** The collision is
a property of the pattern, not of Crafty. Worth an L0 check asserting that every oauth2-proxy
instance in the tree declares a distinct cookie name — the failure is silent and intermittent,
which is exactly the shape this repo keeps getting burned by.