ceremony/docs/RUNNER-PROBES.md

Runner probes

Not a drill. A drill rehearses the release doors on a disposable repo and ends. This is the opposite shape: one standing repo that exists so that runner-only facts can be measured on demand, and it is never archived.

heavy-duty/ceremony-runner-probe — private, standing, reset between probes. Ruled by the operator as option (A) of ceremony#202 (#5631).

Why a standing repo, when drills are disposable

Some facts are only true inside Actions, under the token Actions injects, and no local harness or PAT can reproduce them. The worked example is ceremony#192:

DELETE /issues/{n}/labels/{id}   ->  500   under ${{ github.token }} in a workflow
DELETE /issues/{n}/labels/{id}   ->  204   under a maintainer PAT, same call

A probe that runs anywhere else passes and proves nothing. Before this venue existed the answer was "un-archive a drill repo", which was requested three times in two days across two issues and never became anything — the three drill repos (ceremony-drill-0.4.1, -0.4.1-final, -191) are all archived, and each was minted for one probe and then wanted again.

The disposal rule above does NOT apply here

The rehearsal section says the builder archives the scratch repo and the operator deletes it. That rule is for drills. Archiving this repo defeats its entire purpose, and it is the failure mode the three archived drill repos demonstrate — each was archived correctly, by the rule, and each then had to be un-archived or replaced.

So: never archive it, never delete it, and if you find it archived, un-archive it rather than minting a fourth one.

Standing it up is the operator's step

Bot identities cannot create repositories in heavy-duty. Measured 2026-08-05 with a fleet identity holding the repo scope:

POST /api/v1/orgs/heavy-duty/repos   ->  403  "not allowed to create repository in organization"
POST /api/v1/user/repos              ->  201  (personal namespace only)

This is the same shape as the drill delete: a deliberate permission boundary, not a misconfiguration, and the same rule applies — do not retry it, and do not work around it by putting the venue in a personal namespace, where the org's runner and secrets do not reach. Ask the operator.

Running a probe

1. Reset the repo to a clean state — the probe's own fixtures only, no leftovers from the last one. A probe that inherits state is a probe whose result you cannot attribute.
2. Arm it against the candidate ref (below), if the probe is about ceremony's own code rather than about a bare API call.
3. Run it as an Actions job under ${{ github.token }}. This is the whole point of the venue and the one step that cannot be shortcut. A curl from a laptop with a PAT answers a different question — see the 204/500 split above — and a probe run that way is worse than no probe, because it produces a confident wrong answer.
4. The job writes its raw results into an issue in the PROBE repo — heavy-duty/ceremony-runner-probe — not into ceremony. Logs age out; ceremony#192's run 701 survived only because the job wrote its findings into an issue it created.
5. A human then records the probe issue's URL and the Actions run number on the ceremony issue the probe serves. That hop is deliberate and is the whole of the boundary: the probe workflow holds no credential and no code path that can write to heavy-duty/ceremony, so "the probe reports its findings" and "the probe cannot touch the live board" stay compatible rather than contradicting each other (@codex-reviewer-andresmgsl, #202 review).

Arming a candidate ref

A probe that exercises ceremony's own machinery needs the candidate tree reachable from a uses: line. The shape is the drill rehearsal's, reused rather than reinvented (drills/README.md step 2):

1. The candidate is a commit SHA, on a fork ref. Push the candidate tree to a fork under the identity running the probe — <identity>/ceremony@probe-<issue> — and take its canonical SHA. Never create a branch on heavy-duty/ceremony named like a tag: it shadows that tag for every consumer until somebody remembers to delete it.
2. Install docs/CONSUMERS.md's caller stubs in the probe repo, pinned to that SHA — every uses: reference, not some of them.
3. Rewrite CEREMONY_SELF_REF in the candidate itself to the same canonical SHA. A candidate carries the tag it has not created yet, so the self-consumption checkout cannot resolve until it is rewritten. Both carriers — labels.yml and release.yml — take the same value.
4. Invoke the probe by the event it is about, and record which: a workflow_dispatch of the caller, or the real board event the probe is testing. A probe that fires a different event than the one under test proves something else.
5. Record the fork ref, the rewritten pin, the workflow invoked and the run number in the probe repo's result issue. Those four are what make the result reproducible; without the pin especially, a later reader cannot tell which tree answered.
6. Reset removes the candidate-specific fixtures: the caller stubs, the probe workflow and the result branch, so the next probe does not inherit a pin it did not choose. The result issue stays — it is the evidence.

Who may reset it

Operator-owned until ruled otherwise. #202's task 4 asks who may reset the venue, and creating the repo is the operator's step, so the access policy is his to set at the same time (@codex-reviewer-andresmgsl, #202 review).

Two levels, deliberately separated:

• content reset — deleting probe branches, workflows, fixtures and stale result issues; the ordinary between-probes operation;
• archive / delete / admin — which is where the drill rule's damage came from, and which no bot identity should hold here.

If fleet identities are given push access for content reset, this section records that; until then, ask.

What must never happen here

No probe touches heavy-duty/ceremony's board. No labels, no comments, no runs attributable to a probe. The venue exists so that the live board does not have to be the test fixture.

The probes this venue owes

• ceremony#192 — that the repaired sweep actually lifts a label under the workflow token, which is the half its acceptance criteria cannot get from the hermetic contract tests.
• ceremony#205 — whether POST /actions/workflows/{file}/dispatches works on this instance with a valid ref and inputs. Measured so far: GET /actions/workflows 404s and the dispatch route answers 500 rather than a 4xx, which is not enough to port against.
• A 0.6.0 consumer exercise once ceremony#198 has merged.