Three fixes at one seam: cast could not READ a box it did not build.
#17 — the environment had no read-side coordinate.
`--project` exists because a hand-built project is called whatever someone
typed. The environment has the identical problem and had no flag, so reading
a legacy box forced a choice between mutating that box's UI and renaming OUR
environment to match it. The second is what happened: `prod` became
`production` across the manifest and environments.yaml — a box being deleted
next week naming the environment of the box that replaces it, permanently
(apply creates the environment from --env), moving the store to
incubator.production.env.age and invalidating every runbook. Reverted.
`--environment` is now the coordinate. `--env` stays OURS: manifest block,
binding, age key, store path, team assert. `--environment` is theirs, on the
wire, and nothing else.
#18 — an absent RESOURCE reported as N missing secrets.
The D-237 lie, one level deeper. A resource that is absent reads back exactly
like one present with no env vars, so capture reported all 15 required names
as individually MISSING — from a box that was serving production and sending
mail at that moment — and offered --override as the remedy. Taking that offer
would have "worked": a valid store, hand-carried values, and the real finding
(the manifest and the box disagree about what the app is called) buried.
capture now refuses on the resource, names what does exist, and only reports
per-name MISSING for resources it actually found — where it means what it says.
#19 — cast inventory: see the box before you adopt it.
The missing first step. cast could describe a box it built, change one, and
take values off one for names a manifest declares — but not tell you what is
on a box you did not build, which is the first thing adoption needs. Every
mismatch above surfaced as a refusal from a verb already committed to a course
of action, and the tempting fix for two of them was to bend the manifest toward
the legacy box.
inventory reads resources and env var KEYS (never values), sorts them into
on-both / manifest-only / box-only, and needs no store, no age key and no
recipient — it runs before adoption exists. Its output is a document:
inventory → human reads → manifest PR → capture → apply
That boundary is what lets capture stay strict. inventory may read everything,
because a person reads its output. capture may only write what the manifest
declares, because `apply` reads its output. Same box, two consumers, two
contracts. A manifest-draft emitter is deliberately NOT included: it would be
one `cp` away from becoming desired state, which is the failure this design
exists to prevent.
Zero drift against a hand-built box is reported as suspicious, not as a pass.
npm run check + build clean; 164 tests passing, 18 files (was 151/16).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
cast was scoped to the steady state: manifest → Coolify, forever. It had no
adoption path — no way to bootstrap the age store from an instance built by
hand, before any manifest existed. The operator did it by hand: curl the envs,
assemble 17 name=value pairs into /dev/shm/prod.env, age -r, shred. Every input
to that pipeline is something cast already has, so a human was shuffling cast's
own inputs through a terminal, with the leak (scrollback, history, a tmp file
that never got shredded) and the silent miss both live.
cast capture <org>/<repo> --env <env> [--generated N] [--override N] [--force]
The required set comes from the MANIFEST, not the box: the ${...} refs in that
environment's env templates, read by the same parser apply uses to demand them.
resolveTemplate and templateRefs now share one grammar — a drift between them
would mean capture collects a different set than apply later requires, which is
exactly the "a name silently missed" failure this verb exists to remove.
The mapping is deliberately NOT mechanical. A DATABASE_URL read off the source
points at the SOURCE box's Postgres: confidently wrong, entirely plausible, and
the target's real URL does not exist until Coolify creates the resource. So the
manifest declares `generated_secrets:` and those names are written as the
literal `pending-coolify-generated`. staging's ADMIN_EMAIL must be the operator,
not the source's — staging and prod share a Mailgun domain, so a staging box
carrying the real address can mail real users; that is --override.
A "capture everything" verb would be wrong in ~4 of 17 entries, silently —
worse than being wrong in all of them. So every name is forced into a
disposition, and two of the four stop the run: a name required by a template but
absent from the source REFUSES (an empty substitutes to nothing and the app
boots misconfigured), as does one name carrying different values on two
resources.
generated_secrets is a manifest property rather than a flag the operator must
remember, because the manifest is what knows DATABASE_URL comes from a database
it declares. An entry no template refers to is a hard error: a guard standing
over nothing reads like a guard, and the likeliest cause is a typo whose real
name is then captured from the source instead of placeheld.
Secret hygiene, all covered by tests asserting on real values:
- the plan prints names and provenance, NEVER values
- an --override's value comes from $CAST_CAPTURE_<NAME>, never argv (`ps`)
- plaintext is piped to age on stdin — never a temp file, stdout, or history
- an existing store is not overwritten without --force: it may hold the only
copy of values the source no longer has (apply's never-delete, applied here)
capture inherits diff's absent-target refusal (D-237) — against a project that
isn't there it would report every secret as missing, an alarming report about
the wrong box — plus the team assert and the --path/--env prod ban. The last
gate is a typed confirmation of the environment's name; there is no --yes.
The end-to-end test decrypts the store cast wrote and asserts on its contents,
so "exactly the names the manifest requires, no more and no fewer" is checked
against real ciphertext rather than against cast's own console output.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Public tool, private state. cast holds no hostnames, no bindings, no
secrets: it joins a product repo's .infra/ manifest with a state directory
you point it at, and makes Coolify match.
Extracted from heavy-duty/infra, which was half tool and half state — the
inconsistency that made it impossible to say whether "infra" named a CLI
or a runbook. rig builds the boxes; cast fills them; infra is what they
are filled with.
Two changes were required to make it genuinely stateless and publishable:
- The implicit cwd contract (environments.yaml / secrets/ / .coolify.env
resolved against the working directory, silently reading the wrong file
from the wrong place) is now an explicit --state <dir> / $CAST_STATE.
- BANNED_IN_PROD — a hardcoded list of one product's ALLOW_* flags, the
only product knowledge in the executor — becomes the generic, operator-
owned environments.<env>.forbidden_var_patterns. The guard now lives in
private state, so a product-side change cannot lower its own guard, and
it is a pattern rather than a list, so it catches unforeseen siblings.
Age identities resolve as $CAST_AGE_KEY_FILE_<ENV> then
~/.config/cast/age-<env>.key — which is the entire attended-vs-unattended
apply mechanism, with no environment names known to the tool.
Instance identity (org names, the GitHub App name, founder domains) is out
of the fixtures and out of register-github-app.sh, which took APP_NAME and
ORG as arguments rather than baking them in.
69 tests green; bin/cast + curl installer mirror rig's shape.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
claude-hdb
