The greenfield manifest-first bootstrap was a chicken-and-egg with no
exit, found by the 2026-07-19 release drill: fresh Coolify instance,
registered project, a manifest declaring databases only and resolving
zero ${…} refs. apply refused with "no secret store", and capture — the
documented way to get a store — rightly refused a project absent on the
box, because apply is the verb that would create it. The drill unblocked
with a hand-rolled empty age store, documented nowhere.
Now diff/apply gate the refusal on the manifest actually referencing a
secret, asked via requiredSecrets — the same parser resolution uses, so
the two cannot disagree. Zero refs: an absent store is treated as empty,
a loud one-line note names the path it would live at, and the age key is
not demanded (nothing to decrypt, nothing to protect yet). One ref: the
refusal returns byte-identical to before. capture and destroy are
untouched.
Fixes#104
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
