A backup is a directory <stamp>-<kind> under Backups:Root (/var/lib/privapub/backups, 2770, files 0640), written as
.partial and renamed once whole: a manifest (host, build, newest migration, each collection's count, size, sha256 and
indexes, what was left out and why, the media list), each collection as gzipped canonical Extended JSON read raw, and
hard links to the files of untrashed media rows (copies where a link can't be made). On a replica set every collection
is read in one snapshot session. Never in a backup: the statistics salt, jobs, recovery codes, sessions, the
maintenance lock and the configuration's copy with its SMTP password.
One backup or restore at a time (MaintenanceLock, a heartbeat document), and the janitor purges nothing meanwhile.
BackupScheduler backs up nightly at 03:30 UTC (or at once after missing a night); rotation keeps 7 daily, 4 weekly,
3 pre-deploy and 3 pre-restore backups. CLI: admin backup [--kind] [--db-only], admin backups, admin backup verify;
these run before migrations, so the deploy's own pre-deploy backup, which replaces mongodump, is of the database as the
live build left it. EntityMaps.Warm runs once under a lock, since test hosts now boot side by side.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Owner decision 2026-10-07: production's mongod becomes a one-member replica set (rs0), so that a backup can read every
collection at one instant (a snapshot read session), which a standalone mongod can't. The unit runs mongod with
--replSet rs0 and a 990 MB oplog; setup.sh converts it once, idempotently (PrivaPub stopped, mongod restarted,
rs.initiate, the primary awaited, PrivaPub started); every connection string says directConnection=true, which works
against the standalone too, so this code can deploy before the conversion. The CI's throwaway mongod and the pasture's
are replica sets as well, so the snapshot path is what the tests exercise; MongoTopology tells which a mongod is, and
TopologyTests holds the test mongod to it. The suite passes on it (906).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Anyone could mint signed proxy URLs (a remote account changes its icon, an anonymous lookup returns the URL), and each
anonymous request held up to 40 MB in memory; the cache grew without bound between hourly trims; two clients asking
for the same new file downloaded it twice and wrote over each other in place, so a reader could get half a file with a
7-day cache header; a file over the limit was downloaded twice on every request; a failed fetch, a 404, was cached by
browsers for a week; cached media of a server suspended later were still served, and RejectMedia skipped avatars,
emoji, covers, video variants, link cards and remote edits; /clientapi/group/members returned remote pictures raw.
Now a download is shared by everyone asking at once, streamed into a .part file and renamed into place
(FederationHttp.DownloadMedia copies bounded, never into memory), at most eight at a time; a file too big to cache is
remembered for an hour and only streamed, a failure for five minutes; the cache's size is counted as it grows and
trimmed as soon as it passes the cap; a cached file is opened before it is answered; browsers may cache only a
success; nothing of a suspended server, or of one whose media are rejected, is proxied (everything remote a client
sees goes through the proxy, so that covers every kind), and blocking one purges its cache; the proxy has its own rate
limit per client address; group members' pictures are proxied; the proxy's key is loaded once, the oldest if two
were made. This changes what PrivaPub serves its clients, not what it sends to other servers.
Tests: clients asking at once share one download, a failure isn't cached by browsers, an over-limit file is fetched
three times for two requests instead of four, a blocked server's media are refused and its cache purged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
An upload went straight to libvips: whatever loader recognised the bytes ran (an SVG sent as image/png was rasterised),
nothing bounded how many pixels it would decode to (a small PNG could decode to gigabytes, three times over), a GIF
was loaded frame by frame and never resized, and all of it ran inside the request with nothing limiting how many at
once. A GIF was typed gifv but stayed a .gif, which a gifv player can't play; its metadata was kept; colours lost
their ICC profile without being converted; HEIC was advertised but the bundled libvips can't decode it.
Now:
- only libvips' JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP and HEIF loaders ever run on an upload (every other loader is blocked);
- the header alone says how big an image would decode, refused above Media:MaxPixels (40 MP) or MaxFrames;
- a still image is shrunk on load, turned by its orientation and brought into sRGB (thumbnail), then written without
metadata, a profile picture the same way;
- an animated GIF becomes a looping silent H.264 mp4 typed gifv, as on Mastodon (PostMedia.Kind keeps it a gifv),
and a remote GIF is an image;
- processing runs Media:Concurrency at a time, and uploads have their own rate limit per credential;
- HEIC and HEIF are no longer offered.
Tests: only the upload formats load, the header tells the size, an SVG posing as a PNG and an image too large are
refused before decoding, an animated GIF becomes a gifv and a still one an image, HEIC isn't advertised. The media
scenarios against the pasture (GoToSocial, Mastodon, Misskey, Akkoma, Pixelfed, Smithereen, Vernissage, Castopod,
PeerTube) pass: 329 checks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Federation:Relays names relays by their actor (or inbox) address; the instance actor follows Public at each, as Mastodon
subscribes, a minute after start and every six hours (asked again a day after no answer or a refusal, undone when a
relay is no longer named). What an accepted relay passes on comes to the federated timeline and nobody's home: a public
post it forwards (Activity-Relay), read again from its origin like any forwarded post, and a post it announces
(aode-relay), kept as its author's and never as the relay's boost. Nothing of a persona's is sent to a relay; sending
public posts there waits for the owner.
The pasture gains both relays (peers/relay.sh, peers/aoderelay.sh) and scenarios/relay.sh, 13 checks. The village
backlog is clean: 2574 checks pass, one known gap (Misskey's).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Owner decisions (2026-10-04, recorded in docs/ROADMAP.md): production runs everything that is built, and nothing waits
on a person running a command.
- Geolocation updates itself. GeoUpdater, a hosted service, checks daily whether each DB-IP Lite database was built this
month. If not, it fetches this month's, or last month's early in the month. It installs a file only once it opens as
the right kind of database, then swaps it in atomically, and the locator reloads at once. Lookups now run under the
lock, so a reload can no longer dispose a reader mid-lookup. The systemd timer, its script and their setup.sh lines
are gone: the root step they needed never happened, and none is needed now. /stargazing names the database in use.
- The admin CLI runs after the app is built, with every service and nothing started.
- `create-root <login> [--admin]` takes the password on stdin; it is how the first login is made while sign-up is
closed.
- `smoke <persona>` keeps the root `deploy-smoke` and an undiscoverable persona, and gives the root a new password
on every run.
- The deploy signs in as @thepra. It runs the CLI, gets a token through the real OAuth flow (tools/smoke/oauth.sh,
moved out of the pasture's privapub_token, which now uses it), checks the signed-in API and that @thepra is
undiscoverable, then revokes the token. PRIVAPUB_SMOKE_TOKEN is gone.
- The deploy also fails when:
- NodeInfo and the instance API disagree about registrations;
- /stargazing does not say the crawler is on;
- the geolocation databases are missing or more than 40 days old.
- The crawler is on in production, seeded with ten large servers of different kinds. FEDERATION.md now describes it
and how to opt out.
- One registrations switch (Registrations:Mode, default Invitations; Open in tests and the pasture). It is read by
open sign-up (403 when closed), NodeInfo `openRegistrations`, and v1 and v2 of the instance API, so they can no longer
disagree. Before, NodeInfo said open and the instance API said closed. Group invitations always work, so
invites_enabled is true.
- A persona edit through /clientapi no longer resets what the Mastodon API set (discoverable, locked, quote policy…):
the theme is merged into the settings instead of replacing them.
650 tests pass. The deploy's smoke step was rehearsed against the pasture's PrivaPub.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
Sharkey 2025.4.7 is the Misskey peer under another name, image, database, Redis db and
home. Its scenario is Misskey's plus edits both ways and the FEP-e232 quote tag: 40 checks
pass.
Akkoma 3.20.1 publishes no image, so tools/pasture/images/akkoma installs its OTP
release, pinned by checksum, and appends Caddy's CA to the CA bundles the release ships.
Its scenario has 44 checks, which pass three runs in a row:
- follows, posts, CW, followers-only posts and the published time;
- replies, likes, boosts and their undos;
- EmojiReact both ways and withdrawn;
- DMs, polls, quotes, media, edits with history and deletes, both ways;
- unfollow, block, unblock and statistics.
The two bugs, both fixed:
- Followers-only posts arrived as DMs on Pleroma and Akkoma. They call a post private
only if an address in `to` contains "/followers" or its cc is not empty. Ours is
/groupies, and a post mentioning nobody had an empty cc. The followers collection is now
named in cc as well, which tells nobody anything new.
- Akkoma's open polls showed as ended and refused votes. Akkoma carries an open poll's
end in `closed` and sends no `endTime`. A `closed` in the future is now read as the end.
Neither of these is a PrivaPub bug:
- Akkoma's Linkify never takes @user@host.test for a mention, so its DM addresses alice
with to[].
- Its API never reports a remote blocker as blocked_by, so the block is read from its
database.
Also in this commit:
- The rate limits are configuration (RateLimits: AccountsPerMinute, InboxBurst,
InboxPerTenSeconds), with the old values as defaults. The pasture raises the accounts
limit, which back-to-back runs from one address had hit.
- A new Lemmy never sends what it queued for a server before it started that server's
send worker, so the scenario waits for the worker before its first follow.
All six peers in one clean pass: GoToSocial 54 (+1 expected), Mastodon 49 (+2), Misskey
35, Sharkey 40, Akkoma 44, and Lemmy 20 (+3) once the worker wait was added. 642 tests
pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
tools/pasture/run.sh starts PrivaPub, GoToSocial and Mongo on one podman network behind Caddy's internal CA, and
interop.sh drives both through their own client APIs: follows (one to a locked account), posts, CW, replies, likes,
boosts, DMs, edits, deletes and unfollow. All 25 checks pass, three fresh runs in a row.
- Federation:AcceptAnyCertificate joins the two test-network switches; startup refuses all three in Production.
- WebFinger falls back to http only when AllowPlainHttp is on.
- A bootstrap logger, so a failure before the host is built is no longer silent.
- P4 is ticked in the roadmap, with what has not been run live (Lemmy, a Mastodon circle member).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
thepraandClaude Opus 5.5