jakman85andClaude Opus 5
0c6949ed98
Implements the operator intent: "CI/CD pipeline is the end-all-be-all for approval. If the CI pipeline is not good enough to be trusted for this, then it is not good enough to do its intended job and needs to be improved. Manual approvers should only be for architecturally or security relevant changes." Adds ci/approval-policy.sh as a gate stage. A green gate becomes sufficient for an ordinary change; the one exception is structural rather than a matter of taste: A CHANGE TO THE GATE CANNOT BE GATED BY THE GATE. A PR that weakens a check would be approved by the weakened check. The same holds for the admission policies, the Flux wiring that decides what reconciles, the SOPS recipients and the RBAC. Those paths -- and only those -- still require an APPROVED review from someone other than the author. The list is data with a reason per entry (infra/gitea/approval-policy.json) and is itself a sensitive path, so the policy cannot be widened or narrowed without a human. FAIL-CLOSED, and deliberately the opposite of gitea-settings. There, a missing credential must not block every PR -- that is a lock-out. Here, a missing credential would let an unreviewed change to the gate merge, so "cannot evaluate" is a BLOCK. Verified against real PRs rather than fixtures: PR #16 (sensitive paths, approved by jakman85, author gitea-admin) -> PASS PR #6 (.gitea/workflows/gate.yml, ZERO reviews) -> BLOCK, naming the file push event (not a PR) -> N/A, exit 0 bogus token -> BLOCK, not skip Also caught before shipping: the first draft passed the PR file list with a second stdin redirect after a heredoc, which silently wins and leaves the script body unread. Running it found that; reading it would not have. required_approvals is NOT changed here. Flipping it live must happen together with the declaration in expected-branch-protection.json, or gitea-settings correctly fails on the drift -- that is a separate, deliberate change. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
169 lines
8.3 KiB
Markdown
169 lines
8.3 KiB
Markdown
# CLAUDE.md — how work lands in this repo
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Read this before doing anything durable. It is the delivery contract for AI coding
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sessions and agents. `DECISIONS-LOG.md`'s last entry is the current PM handoff and
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takes precedence on *what* to work on; this file governs *how* it lands.
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## 1. Never push to `main`. Ever.
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Every durable change reaches `main` exactly one way:
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branch -> push the branch -> open a PR -> CI gate green -> human approval -> merge
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There is no other path. Specifically:
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- **Do not `git push origin main`.**
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- **Do not `git push origin HEAD:main`.** Same thing wearing a hat.
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- **Do not merge your own PR.** See the approval model below — and either way, the merge is
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someone else's action, never yours.
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### Who approves
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**The CI/CD pipeline is the approver.** A green gate is sufficient for an ordinary change; the
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branch requires no human approval for one. That is a deliberate transfer of authority, on the
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operator's stated principle: *if the pipeline is not good enough to be trusted for this, it is not
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good enough to do its job and needs improving* — so a weak gate is a bug to fix, not a reason to
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add a human.
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**One exception, enforced by `ci/approval-policy.sh`:** a change to the pipeline itself, the
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admission policies, the Flux wiring, the SOPS recipients, the RBAC, or this file needs an
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approving review from someone who is not its author. The reason is narrow and structural — **a
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change to the gate cannot be gated by the gate.** A PR that weakens a check would be approved by
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the weakened check. Everything else merges on green.
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The path list is data, with a reason per entry: `infra/gitea/approval-policy.json`. It is itself a
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sensitive path, so the policy cannot be widened or narrowed without a human.
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That stage is **fail-closed** — if it cannot evaluate, it blocks. Unlike `gitea-settings`, where a
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missing credential is a lock-out, here a skip would be a bypass.
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- **Do not `kubectl apply` / `edit` / `patch` a durable change.** Flux reconciles `main`;
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anything applied by hand is drift that the next reconcile reverts or, worse, adopts.
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> **Many runbooks under `runbooks/` still say `git push origin main` IS the deploy.**
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> That wording is **stale** — it predates the PR flow. It describes what Flux does
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> (main is what the cluster follows), not what you are permitted to do. Honour this
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> file, not that line. Fixing those runbooks is tracked work.
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## 2. Enforcement (as of 2026-09-29: the rule is now MACHINE-ENFORCED)
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Verified against the live Gitea on 2026-09-29:
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| Expected | Actual |
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| `main` protected, direct push rejected | ✅ `protected: true`, `user_can_push: false` — **verified by a real rejected push**, not by the API's word |
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| PR blocked until the gate passes | ✅ `enable_status_check: true`, context `gate / gate (pull_request)` |
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| Gate runs on every PR | ✅ runner `incluster-dind` online; ~1m35s |
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| Approval required before merge | ✅ `required_approvals: 1` |
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All four were FALSE as recently as 2026-09-29, while this repo's own log asserted they were
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true. They are true now because each was measured, and the push rejection was provoked rather
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than assumed. **Re-measure before relying on any of them** — see §2b.
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Still not covered: `vars.CLUSTER_AVAILABLE` is unset, so **L2/L3 conformance does not run in
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CI**. A green PR therefore proves the L0/L1 offline subset, not runtime behaviour.
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**Consequence for you:** CI now runs, but it does not yet *block* anything. Always run
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the toolbox gate yourself and quote its numbers. Never describe a PR as "green" on the
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strength of a check you have not seen report — and note that a **skipped** Gitea job
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reports as `success`, so a green tick is not by itself evidence that anything ran.
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## 2b. Never infer platform state from this repository
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**This repo is not evidence about the live platform.** Neither is `DECISIONS-LOG.md`.
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Both describe what someone believed at the time of writing, and both have been
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confidently wrong for a month at a stretch.
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On 2026-09-29 the log stated the merge gate was a required status check with a runner
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online. The API said `branch_protections: []` and **zero** runners. Everything downstream
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of that belief — "the gate enforces this", "your push would be rejected", "CI covers it" —
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was wrong, and nothing in the tree could have revealed it, because the tree was the source
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of the error.
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**So, before asserting that any gate, protection, runner, secret, or workload is in a
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given state: query the thing itself.**
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| Claim about... | Check |
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| branch protection / required checks | `GET /api/v1/repos/{owner}/{repo}/branches/main` |
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| a runner exists | `GET /api/v1/admin/actions/runners` |
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| CI actually ran | the commit's `/statuses` — and read the **description**; a *skipped* Gitea job reports `success` with "Has been skipped" |
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| a workload / Secret / env | `kubectl --context k3s-prod ...` (read-only is fine for agents) |
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| Flux applied your commit | compare `.status.lastAppliedRevision` against the GitRepository's artifact revision |
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Quote the measured field, not the prose. If you cannot measure it, say so explicitly —
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"unverified" is a legitimate report, and a far better one than a confident guess that
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matches the docs.
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**A green tick is not proof anything ran.** Read what actually executed.
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## 3. Gate before you push
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./infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c './ci/gate.sh'
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Exit codes are a contract — do not flatten them:
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| rc | Meaning |
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| 0 | PASS |
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| 1 | BLOCKED — something failed |
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| 3 | UNDETERMINED — a stage did not run. **Never report this as green.** |
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`spec-immutability` reaches rc 3 whenever the sibling spec repo is not checked out
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beside this one; that single skip is expected and tolerated. Any *other* skip is a
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real gap in your run.
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**Never gate on the host.** `promtool` and `kustomize` are not on the host `$PATH`,
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so checks SKIP and you get a false rc 3. Only the pinned toolbox result counts.
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### Running the gate from a git worktree
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Two unrelated failures, both with known workarounds — put both in any agent brief:
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1. **`dev.sh` refuses to start:** `infra/ansible/.cache/prod.kubeconfig` is untracked
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and exists only in the main checkout. Do **not** copy it (it is a credential).
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Use `DEV_KUBECONFIG=/dev/null` — the gate contacts no cluster, so L2/L3 scaffold-skip
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normally.
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2. **Every `git` call inside the container fails:** a worktree's `.git` is a pointer to a
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gitdir outside the mounted root. `dev.sh` takes no extra-mount flag, so inject one via
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the `ENGINE` hook — a shim that intercepts `run` and re-execs
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`podman run -v /path/to/main/.git:/path/to/main/.git:ro "$@"`. A traceback in
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`tracked_files()` is this bug, not a broken tree.
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## 4. Branch naming
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Use `feat/`, `fix/`, `docs/`, `chore/`. Note that `.gitea/workflows/gate.yml`'s **push**
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trigger lists `feature/**` — not `feat/**` — so branch pushes get no fast-feedback run.
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The `pull_request` trigger fires regardless of branch name, so the PR gate is unaffected.
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## 5. Cluster access
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`kubectl` does not work on the operator workstation; the toolchain lives only in the
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pinned container. Always name the context explicitly:
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./infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c 'kubectl --context k3s-prod get nodes'
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`dev.sh` merges both clusters and picks a current-context **per invocation**; that
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default has already changed once. Never rely on it. Do not run two `dev.sh`
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invocations concurrently.
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**Mutating `kubectl` and `flux reconcile` are operator actions, not agent actions.**
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## 6. Secrets
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- **Never `sops -d` a file into a terminal, a log, or a transcript.**
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- **Never print a Secret's `.data`/`.stringData`** when checking whether it exists —
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list key names or object names only. A password has been leaked into a transcript
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this way before.
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- Encrypted files are `*.sops.yaml` or live under `secrets/`. The root `.sops.yaml` is
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the single creation-rules file; do not add a second one in a subtree.
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- A short-lived credential (e.g. a plex.tv claim token, ~minutes) cannot survive the PR
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flow. Do not design around committing one — read the expiry from the issuing page and
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treat a burnt token as free to retry.
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## 7. Before you finish
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Append a handoff entry to `DECISIONS-LOG.md` describing what you changed, what you
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verified, and what you did **not** verify. State gaps plainly — an honest
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"UNVERIFIED" is worth more than an optimistic "green", and this repo has already been
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burned by the difference.
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