home-network-k3s-impl/infra/gitea/README.md

infra/gitea — platform settings that are NOT GitOps-managed

Gitea's own repo settings (branch protection, required status checks, approvals) live in Gitea's database, not in a manifest Flux reconciles. They are therefore drift-prone and invisible to the gate — exactly how the state below went unnoticed.

The gap this closes

Verified against the live API on 2026-09-29, against a DECISIONS-LOG.md entry (2026-08-31) asserting the opposite:

Claimed	Measured
main is a protected branch, gate is a required status check	branch_protections → []; protected:false, enable_status_check:false, required_approvals:0, user_can_push:true
Runner incluster-dind online	zero runners registered at repo, org and site level

So main accepted direct pushes, and the gate could not run at all. CLAUDE.md is the rule; this directory is how the rule gets enforced by the machine.

branch-protection.sh

Blocks direct pushes to main. Run it, then run the push probe it prints — verify, do not trust the API response, since Gitea may let site admins bypass protection.

./infra/gitea/branch-protection.sh

It authenticates with the credential git already has stored for this host, and never prints the secret.

runner-token-rotate.sh

Mints a fresh instance-level registration token from the Gitea API and writes it into apps/wave-1/gitea-actions-runner-secret.sops.yaml via sops set. The token value is never printed.

./infra/gitea/runner-token-rotate.sh

A fresh token is usually not sufficient on its own. act_runner registers exactly once and persists its identity in /data/.runner on the act-runner-data PVC. If Gitea no longer holds a matching runner row, the pod starts, sees .runner, skips registration, and polls with an identity Gitea does not recognise — so it never appears in the runner list. That is precisely the observed symptom: zero runners, pod running, no error anyone looks at. Clearing the PVC is what forces a real re-registration; the script prints the commands.

Sequence — DONE 2026-09-29

All four steps are complete and each was verified, not assumed:

Step	State
1. Runner registered	✅ incluster-dind online. Root cause of its absence was a stale /data/.runner identity; clearing the PVC forced re-registration
2. Gate observed green on a real PR	✅ gate / gate (pull_request) ~1m35s
3. enable_status_check: true	✅ context gate / gate (pull_request) — that one ONLY
4. Collaborator + approvals	✅ jakman85 is owner; required_approvals: 1

Direct push to main was provoked and rejected (pre-receive hook declined) as gitea-admin, a site admin — so push protection is not merely declared, it holds for the account agents authenticate as.

5. Block the admin override — the step the first pass MISSED

enable_status_check and required_approvals were set on 2026-09-29 and still did not bite, because block_admin_merge_override was false. Gitea lets repo admins override merge requirements without it, and jakman85 holds owner — so the two settings that looked like the gate were overridable by precisely the account that merges.

The evidence was sitting in plain sight: PRs #5 through #9 all merged with required_approvals: 1 in force and zero approvals recorded on any of them. Checking the branch view (/branches/main) hid this — it does not expose the field. Read the rule object (/branch_protections/main) and enumerate its keys.

Do not probe for field names you assume exist. This Gitea (1.24.3) has no apply_to_admins; asking jq for it returns null, which reads like "set to false" but means "key absent". Enumerate with to_entries and act on what is really there.

Now block_admin_merge_override: true. That is still only a setting, not evidence — it is proven when a green PR is REFUSED a merge until approved, and not before.

require-gate.sh / verify-then-enforce.sh

verify-then-enforce.sh is the re-runnable form of the whole safe order. It merges nothing — merging is a human's reviewed act — but it forces the Flux reconcile and then aborts unless the runner pod is healthy, a runner is online, and a real workflow goes green on it, before enabling enforcement and probing the push. require-gate.sh is the enforcement step alone.

Re-run verify-then-enforce.sh after any future change to the act-runner Deployment.

expected-branch-protection.json + ci/gitea-settings.sh — the detector

expected-branch-protection.json declares the desired rule. ci/gitea-settings.sh runs as a merge-gate stage, reads the LIVE rule, and fails the gate on any divergence — plus asserts at least one runner is online. It is the only thing in this repository that can see Gitea's own database.

It reads /branch_protections/main, not /branches/main: the branch view does not expose block_admin_merge_override, and it showed all-green for hours while the rule was overridable.

Behaviour, proven by test rather than assumed:

Situation	Exit	Effect
live matches the declaration	0	green
any key drifted, or no runner online	1	blocks the merge
no GITEA_SETTINGS_TOKEN, or Gitea unreachable	3	skips loudly; never a pass, never a block

The skip is deliberately not a block: an unwired credential blocking every PR is the lock-yourself-out failure this repo keeps hitting. Wire the token with set-ci-token.sh, confirm the stage goes green on a real PR, and only then set REQUIRE_GITEA_SETTINGS=true in gate.yml so a future missing token blocks instead of skipping.

Changing the declaration is how you change policy. If the live state is what you now want, edit this JSON in the same commit — deliberately, in review — rather than letting the two drift.

Why these scripts exist at all, and what is still missing

Gitea's repo settings live in its own database, not in anything Flux reconciles or the conformance gate can read. Nothing detects drift from what this directory declares. That is the root cause of the entire 2026-09-29 session: branch protection was off and the runner was gone for a month while the log recorded both as working, and no check existed that could have caught it.

These scripts encode the desired state and can re-assert it; ci/gitea-settings.sh above is the detector that turns divergence from a silent, invisible failure into a loud one. It closes the root cause of the 2026-09-29 session.

It is only as good as its wiring: until GITEA_SETTINGS_TOKEN exists it skips, and a skipped detector detects nothing. That is the remaining step.

Historical sequence (kept for context)

Original ordering notes

1. Get an Actions runner registered — runner-token-rotate.sh, then clear the PVC so the runner actually re-registers, then confirm it shows online in the API. Do not skip the confirmation: the whole reason this went unnoticed is that a runner was recorded as online without anyone checking.
2. Watch the gate actually report on a real PR, and note the context name it produced.
3. Only then set enable_status_check: true with that exact context.
4. Add the human reviewer as a repo collaborator, then raise required_approvals to 1.

Do not do step 3 before step 1. A required status check with no runner leaves every PR permanently pending — including the PR that would fix it. That half is measured: PR #1 sat pending for 30.6 minutes across 122 polls with no runner registered, and never reported.

Measured, once the runner came up (2026-09-29)

The first CI jobs this repo ever ran, on PR #1 and PR #2:

Context	Result	Time
gate / gate (pull_request)	success	1m58s (PR #1), 1m34s (PR #2)
gate / gate (push)	success	1m32s (PR #2 only)
gate / conformance (pull_request)	success — "Has been skipped"	—

Require gate / gate (pull_request). Do NOT require either conformance context — but not for the reason an earlier draft of this file gave. A skipped Gitea Actions job does not hang a status check: Gitea reports it as success with the description "Has been skipped". So requiring it would not deadlock anything — it would pass vacuously, every time, forever, while nothing ran. Under HARD RULE 4 that is worse than a deadlock: a deadlock is loud, a permanently-green check that verifies nothing is exactly the fail-open shape this repo keeps finding.

The (push) contexts appear only for branches matching gate.yml's push trigger (feature/**, fix/**, docs/**, chore/**). feat/** is not in that list, which is why PR #1's feat/ branch produced only pull_request contexts. Require only the pull_request context, or PRs from non-matching prefixes will never satisfy the rule.