retire the single-user claim from the docs it outlived

CLAUDE.md asserted "single-user is a hard invariant, not a stage" while
users held six rows and role_capabilities held grants. Every doc that
repeated it is corrected here, in prose and in the code comments that
carried the same claim.

The accurate statement is narrower: one owner who bypasses every check,
other accounts holding only what their role is granted, and a set of
capabilities — terminal, chat, files, tasks, items, desktop, browser — that
are structurally ungrantable because they execute as the owner's OS user.

TODO.md gains a Multi-user section for what the read turned up: no way to
create a second account, dashboards.id colliding across users, authorize.ts
untested, pty/vault/opencode taking no identity, Radicale still owner_only.

claude-sidecar-isolation.md's open question is answered rather than left
open — the per-email spawn model is dead weight, because chat is an
execution capability and no second account can ever reach it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-07 21:58:44 +00:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent ac64a7362b
commit d56be0301d
13 changed files with 227 additions and 75 deletions
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@@ -2,14 +2,36 @@
## Project Overview
Officer is a self-hosted personal platform for one person: the server owner. It bundles an AI agent,
a terminal, a file browser, a code editor, email, a bitcoin wallet, a remote desktop and customisable
dashboards behind a single web app.
Officer is a self-hosted platform built around one person the server owner — which since 2026-08-07
also admits **additional accounts holding a strict subset of it**. It bundles an AI agent, a terminal,
a file browser, a code editor, email, a bitcoin wallet, a remote desktop and customisable dashboards
behind a single web app.
**Single-user is a hard invariant, not a stage.** There is exactly one account, created once by
`POST /auth/bootstrap` while the user table is empty. There are no roles, no invitations, no
sandboxing of one user from another, and no per-user isolation anywhere in the codebase. If a change
seems to need "which user is this", the answer is always the owner.
**The owner/member split, and where the line falls.** This file said "single-user is a hard invariant,
not a stage" until 2026-08-07. That is no longer true and had already stopped being true when it was
written: `users` holds six rows. The accurate statement is narrower and more useful —
- **One owner.** User id 1, role `Super Admin`, created by `POST /auth/bootstrap` while the table is
empty, pinned there by a CHECK constraint. The owner bypasses every permission check.
- **Other accounts get only what their ROLE is granted.** Roles are `Admin`, `Member`, `Developer`;
grants live in `role_capabilities`, keyed on role, never on user. Absence denies — there is no row
meaning "no", so an empty table is a server where members reach nothing but their own profile.
- **Some things can never be shared, structurally.** Terminal, chat, tasks, files, desktop and browser
are `kind: 'execution'` in the capability registry: they run as the owner's OS user in the owner's
home, so there is no level of "read" that makes them safe. They have no level at all and the grants
API refuses to store one.
So "which user is this" now has a real answer for the **app** surface (gitea, music, photos, email,
calendar…), and is still always "the owner" for anything that executes code or touches the disk.
`src/servers/capabilities/registry.ts` is the authority and reads as the design document for this.
**Mounting a router without a registry entry makes the server refuse to boot** — see "Capabilities"
below before adding one.
**Still single-user: account creation.** `createUser` has exactly one call site, `auth/bootstrap.ts`,
gated on an empty table. There is no signup route, no invite flow and no admin create-user handler, so
every existing member was inserted into Postgres by hand. That is the largest gap in the model, not a
deliberate boundary.
## Architecture
@@ -111,17 +133,50 @@ exceed Postgres's 63-character identifier limit: name it explicitly. See `src/da
## Security Model
The perimeter is one credential, so the guards matter:
- `IS_DEV_BUILD` (`src/servers/build-env.ts`) is true **only** when `PUBLIC_BUILD_ENV` is explicitly
`dev`/`development`. Everything else, including unset, is hardened. Origin validation, rate
limiting and password rules all key off it — they fail closed.
- Allowed origins come from `PUBLIC_URL`. Officer always sits behind an HTTPS reverse proxy, so the
forwarded `Host` must equal `PUBLIC_URL`'s authority exactly.
- **`ALLOW_ANY_ORIGIN` defaults to ON** — origin checking is off unless the var is explicitly `false`.
A deliberate inversion of the usual rule, safe only because the perimeter is the tailnet and a valid
token is still required on every protected route. It is defence in depth that is currently switched
off, not the lock.
- JWTs are 30-day, blacklisted on signout, and invalidated by a password change (`passwordChangedAt`).
**The role is deliberately not a claim** — every authorization decision re-reads `users.role` from
Postgres, so a grant or a revoke takes effect on the next request rather than at next sign-in.
- A panic lockdown (`src/servers/api/auth/panic.ts`) is in-memory only and refuses every
authenticated request until the server restarts.
### Capabilities — read this before mounting a router
Authorization is one system, and it is not in `userMiddleware` (which only answers "is this token
valid"). It is `originScopeMiddleware``capabilities/authorize.ts`, mounted globally in `hono.ts`
ahead of everything, and it re-verifies the token itself so it covers routes that never mount
`userMiddleware`.
- `capabilities/registry.ts` — the single enumeration of what the platform can do, in four kinds:
`core` (every account, not deniable), `app` (**the grantable surface**), `execution` and `admin`
(owner only, and `execution` is never grantable at any level).
- `capabilities/authorize.ts` — resolves "may this account do this". Owner short-circuits first; every
other answer is role grants plus core, with `execution`/`admin` stripped even if a row grants them.
**Every catch returns deny.** Grants are cached by role and the cache's whole invalidation contract
is `invalidateRoleGrants`, called by the one writer in `api/users/capabilities-routes.ts`.
- `capabilities/totality.ts``assertCapabilityTotality` runs in `server.tsx` **before `serve()` and
throws**. Mount a router or a socket without a registry entry and `pm2 restart officer` fails,
naming what is missing. That is deliberate: the hole it closes was a Member 403'ing on
`GET /api/tasks` and opening `/api/tasks/pipeline/ws` with a 101 in the same minute, because Bun's
route table matches the socket before the `/api/*` catch-all that reaches Hono. A patch does not
survive the next door; refusing to boot does.
So **adding a router means adding one line to `CAPABILITIES`**. If the surface genuinely is not
user-gated, add it to `EXEMPT_API_PREFIXES` in `totality.ts` *with a reason* — an unexplained exemption
is how the hole happened the first time.
The frontend hook `useCapabilities` **fails open** on purpose: hiding a dock icon is a courtesy, the
403 is the lock, and an owner locked out by a transient network error is worse than a member clicking
into a refusal.
## Commands
```bash