# Music — the second plugin **Status: extracted 2026-08-15.** Written after the fact rather than during, because unlike offscale this one had no design questions left open — the runbook (`plugins/EXTRACTING-A-PLUGIN.md`) had already decided everything except one call. This records what moved, what did not, and the two bugs the extraction found. Read `plugins/offscale/PLUGIN.md` first. It is the design document for the plugin system; this is a worked second case, and it is interesting mainly for being the messy one. --- ## What music is The `/music` screen, the library index, and the phone and tablet apps that stream from it. The contract those apps speak is `MUSIC_API.md`, next to this file — it is the reason the sidecar's HTTP shape is not free to change. ``` manifest.ts identity, one permission api/router.ts re-exports the platform's proxy — see below sidecar/index.ts the whole /api/music contract (503 lines) sidecar/indexer.ts the library walker → cache tree + manifest (1079 lines) sidecar/stream-audio.ts 206 / Content-Range / 416, and X-Audio-Duration sidecar/nightly-reindex.ts 3am full rebuild, staged and swapped db/ music_favorites, _playlists, _playlist_items, _now_playing web/ two panels and a layout; the shell renders the Workspace scripts/ the reindex CLI, which talks to the sidecar port directly ``` --- ## The three things that stayed, and why Offscale left nothing behind. Music leaves three, and calling them seams rather than loose ends only means each one is written down with what would close it. ### 1. cliamp — out of scope by decision `cliamp` and `cliamp-audio` are a _second_ playback path: the `cliamp` TUI run on the server, with its terminal and its PulseAudio null sink piped to the browser. The owner's call was that it is the least important part of music and not worth blocking the extraction on. It was already inert before any of this — the two sockets are declared in `server.tsx`'s route table and upgrade into `handlers` entries that are commented out. So: - `src/servers/sidecar/music/` still holds `cliamp-ws.ts`, `pulse-audio.ts`, `asoundrc` and `cliamp-ws.test.ts`. **Untouched.** - This plugin's sidecar still serves those sockets, so it imports both modules from `@@/sidecar/music/`. A plugin importing platform code is ordinary; the reverse would not be. - `src/servers/api/cliamp/relay.ts` stays, and it is what keeps the next item alive. ### 2. `src/servers/api/music/router.ts` — kept alive by the relay `relay.ts` imports `getMusicServerWsUrl` from it. So the platform's proxy could not move, and this plugin's `api/router.ts` **re-exports it** rather than building a second one. That is not laziness. `createSidecarProxy` learns its port from a one-shot `music:server` event and subscribes at import. Two proxies would mean two subscribers, both working today, and a `503` on the first reconnect where only one of them happened to be listening — the same class of failure as the install-order bug offscale found, and just as invisible from reading. ### 3. The player — the one open judgement call, and it is decided **`officerdev/src/MusicPlayer/` stays in the platform.** The runbook left this open with either answer acceptable. What decided it was not the overlay but the state: > `useMusicPlayer` and `PlayerTrack` are imported from `officerdev` by > `src/workspaces/widgets/MusicPlayer/`, the dashboard widget — which is _also_ out of scope and stays. > **The platform cannot import from a plugin.** So the player state stays here whatever is decided about > the UI around it, and a second copy would mean two audio engines fighting over one pair of speakers. Given the state had to stay, splitting the engine and the bar away from the thing they drive would have left the same seam in a worse place. And moving them needed a shell slot that renders a plugin-provided component on **every route** — which is exactly the escape hatch this system deleted on purpose. "There is no way to export a component" is what makes "every plugin route is a Workspace" a property of the shape rather than a rule someone has to remember, and reopening it for one plugin is a bad trade. The seam is inert without the plugin: `MusicPlayerHost` gates on `can('music')`, and `music` is now the plugin's permission — registered at install, gone at uninstall. What stayed with it, and why each: `gapless-engine` (the engine the state drives), `player-time` (the module-level bridge the lyrics pane meets it through), `useLyricsOpen` and `MusicHeart` + `useMusicFavorites` (the bar renders a heart), and `shared.ts` — the library vocabulary, which the host needs a third of and the plugin needs all of. One definition on the host side beats a copy either side of the boundary drifting apart; `plugins/music/web/shared.ts` re-exports it from the package's declared `officerdev/MusicPlayer/shared` subpath. **What would close it:** the widget learning to come from a plugin. Not the overlay slot — that one should stay shut. --- ## Two bugs, neither visible from reading **The app-store catalogue still listed music, and that would have blanked the screen.** `capabilityAvailability()` derives from `sidecar_installs`, and a _plugin_ never gets a row there — its install state is `plugin_installs`. So `music` would have been permanently `unavailable`, which puts `/music` into `deniedRoutes`: dock tile withheld, screen blank, on a server where the plugin was installed, enabled and healthy. This is the **headscale bug, exactly** — and it is documented six lines above where the music entry sat, in the same file. Found by reading that note rather than by hitting it again, which is the only reason it cost minutes instead of an evening. Entry removed. **`[test] root = "./src"`, so moving `lyrics.test.ts` into `plugins/` stopped running it silently.** The count fell by nine and the suite still read green-ish. A test that quietly stops running is worse than one that fails, and _every_ future extraction would have taken its tests out of the suite the same way. Root is now the repo. Positional filters cannot fix this — `bun test plugins` matches paths under root, so it finds `src/servers/plugins/` and not `plugins/`. --- ## Permissions One permission, `music`, and the key is deliberately unchanged from the registry entry it replaces — so every existing `role_capabilities` grant keeps meaning what it meant, and `can('music')` keeps resolving for the overlay. Renaming it would have been a silent data change. The old entry carried `personal: ['/favorites', '/now-playing', '/playlists', '/queue']`. A manifest has no `personal` field and should not grow one: that is the per-user visibility model, which is the plugin's own job and explicitly not this extraction's work. They ride across on `readOnlyWrites` instead, because `isRequestAllowedAtLevel` **concatenates the two lists** — one mechanism under two names. A read grant therefore permits exactly the four paths it permitted yesterday, and no field was added. `/queue` is in that list because it was. No such route exists, in the sidecar or anywhere else. `[open]` What a member's grant _means_ is unfinished, and music is where the richer model was always going to be designed (`plugins/offscale/PLUGIN.md` says so). It is genuinely non-uniform here in a way offscale's is not: favourites, playlists and now-playing are already per-caller — the sidecar scopes every one by the `X-Officer-User` header the proxy injects — while the library is one shared index for the household. So "whose row is this" already has a real answer on one side and not the other. That is a change inside `db/queries.ts`, not a flag on the manifest. --- ## Host dependencies a manifest cannot declare `ffmpeg` and `ffprobe`, for tag reading, cover compression and video poster frames. There is no field for a host binary and inventing one for this would be a field nothing else reads. **Neither is installed on this machine** (verified 2026-08-15). The sidecar starts and serves fine — the `X-Audio-Duration` header simply does not appear, and indexing would produce no tags or covers. Nothing breaks today because there is no library: `~/Music` did not exist either. `cliamp`, `parec`, `pulseaudio` and `pactl` stayed behind with cliamp. The sidecar logs `pulseaudio not installed, skipping audio setup` and carries on, which is the right shape. --- ## Verified on the live server, 2026-08-15 The runbook's table, run against `platform.officer.dev` rather than reasoned about. | Step | Result | | ------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | install | streamed 5 steps; schema applied in 2082ms; `officer-music` online; `/example, /music, /offscale` mounted | | the API | `/api/music/manifest` 200, `/api/music/favorites` returns per-user JSON | | range requests | full 200 + `Accept-Ranges`; `bytes=100-199` → **206**, correct `Content-Range`, exactly 100 bytes; unsatisfiable → **416**; `../../etc/passwd` → **400** | | the screen | route generated in `Plugins.gen.tsx`, panels in the built bundle, `PluginScreen` wraps `WorkspaceView`. Structural — not eyeballed in a browser | | dock | tile present in `/api/user/capabilities`; `/music` in `routes`, not in `deniedRoutes` | | permissions page | `music` listed among the grantable | | disable | route 404s, sidecar `stopped`, **rows survive** | | enable | 200 again, sidecar online, favourites still there | | uninstall | route 404s, **absent from pm2**, ecosystem entry removed, **rows survive** | | `bun db:push` while uninstalled | **`No changes detected`**, rows survive | | install again | byte-identical steps, and a **restore** — the seeded favourite and playlist came back | | `pm2 restart officer` | boots clean, all three plugins mount, music answers 200 | Seeded rows and the audio fixture were removed afterwards; `~/Music` was deleted again, since it did not exist before. **Music is left INSTALLED and enabled.** It had been switched off since 2026-08-13, so this restores it. --- ## Still open - **`hasPersonalWrites` reads `c.personal` only**, so the permissions API reports `false` for a plugin that declares the same thing through `readOnlyWrites`. Nothing renders the field, so it is dead on the wire — noted rather than fixed. - **Two dock sources.** The app store keeps its own catalogue while the plugin system builds tiles from manifests, and the self endpoint concatenates both. One when the store is rebuilt on the plugin system. - **`src/servers/sidecar/protocol.ts` still declares `music:server`** per sidecar. Generalising the union to `` `${string}:server` `` is the better fix and is pending for the whole protocol. - **The cliamp sockets are claimed by no capability**, and are served. Now pinned by a test in `registry.test.ts` rather than left to be rediscovered — closing it is the totality work.