platform/docs/working-on-officer.md

Working on Officer

The guide for anyone — human or agent — changing this deployment. It assumes you are working from the root of the install (the directory holding platform/, capabilities/ and data/), which is where agent sessions start.

Three directories sit there, and knowing which one a change belongs in is most of the job:

officer/
├── platform/       the application — a git repo
├── capabilities/   what the agent can do — a separate git repo
└── data/           runtime state — NOT version controlled

Officer is a self-hosted personal platform: an AI agent, a terminal, a file browser, a code editor, email, chat channels, a remote desktop and dashboards, behind one web app. It serves exactly one person — the owner of this server. There is no tenancy, no roles, no other users. If a question turns on "which user", the answer is the owner.

platform/ and capabilities/ each have their own CLAUDE.md with detail. This file is the layer above them: where things live, how to change them safely, and the things that are true of the running system but written down nowhere else.

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Which directory does this change belong in?

capabilities/ — almost always start here. Tasks, tools, skills, processes. It is data: plain directories of Markdown and scripts, read fresh on every request. Adding a task, changing what a task does, renaming a category — none of that needs a code change or a restart.

platform/ — only when the mechanism itself is missing. If a task needs a form control that doesn't exist, or an endpoint that isn't there, that's platform work. Adding a capability is not.

data/ — never edit by hand. DATA_PATH. Holds the owner's managed home, per-account email SQLite stores, job logs, the queue, sidecar state. It is not backed up by git; deleting things here destroys the only copy.

A useful test: would this differ between two Officer installs? Domain, paths, credentials → .env. Which tasks exist and what they're called → capabilities/. Everything else → platform/.

Git

Both repos are on master, both push to gitea.pastilhas.dev. There is one branch; per-instance differences live in .env, never in tracked files.

Commit and push both repos when a change spans them — a task usually pairs with the platform support it needs, and a half-pushed pair leaves the deployment inconsistent.

Keep history linear: git pull --rebase, not git merge. The remote moves — the owner develops on this box too — so expect to rebase before pushing. Say so before force-pushing anything.

Commit messages: simple lowercase, no prefixes, explaining why.

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Running and checking your work

The server runs under pm2 as officer, plus sidecars (officer-anthropic-proxy, officer-agent, officer-opencode, officer-email, officer-pty, officer-vnc, officer-music, officer-vault, officer-slskd). pm2 list shows them; pm2 logs officer follows.

Two of those names are worth knowing apart: officer-anthropic-proxy holds the Anthropic credential and proxies API traffic; officer-agent is the process that actually runs claude. They used to be one confusingly-named entry (officer-claude) that was only the proxy.

Don't restart the owner's server to test. Boot your own on a spare port instead — the running instance holds PORT from .env (9010):

cd platform && PORT=59999 bun --env-file=.env src/server.tsx

Before claiming anything works:

cd platform
bunx tsgo --noEmit     # must be 0 errors — the tree is clean, keep it that way
bun test               # must stay green
bun format             # prettier, changed files only

Calling the API by hand

Protected routes validate the Host header against PUBLIC_URL, so a plain localhost request gets 403 Invalid origin. Send the real host explicitly:

TOKEN=$(bun --env-file=.env -e \
  'import { sign } from "./src/servers/jwt.ts"; console.log(await sign({ id: 1, email: "<owner>" }, "10m"))')
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" -H "Host: rezio.pastilhas.dev" http://127.0.0.1:9010/api/tasks

This trips people up repeatedly. It is also why script tasks are handed OFFICER_API_HOST.

Services this box depends on

port	what	used by
9010	Officer itself	—
9002	Kokoro TTS	text-to-speech
8178	whisper.cpp	transcription
1234	vision model (Qwen2.5-VL)	OCR
5432	Postgres	the database

URLs live in Settings → System, stored in the server_config table — not in .env. If transcription or OCR fails, check the service is up before reading any code.

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The task system

This is what most requests will be about. Tasks appear in the file browser's right-click menu under Run Task, grouped into submenus by category.

A task is a directory under capabilities/tasks/<slug>/ with a TASK.md — frontmatter plus a body — and, for script mode, a sibling run.sh / run.py / index.ts. The directory name is the task's identity; renaming it breaks every reference to it.

capabilities/CLAUDE.md documents the format. It is accurate but incomplete — the following are used heavily by real tasks and appear nowhere in it:

convention	what it does
category: Video	which submenu the task appears in. Order comes from capabilities/categories.yaml; an unlisted category still works, sorting after the listed ones. A category with no tasks never renders.
inline: true	runs ephemerally in the modal instead of becoming a job
inline: ask	offers both — Run here and Run as job
INPUT_INCLUDE	newline-separated paths, injected by the modal on a multi-selection. The single most used input in the library — a task that ignores it silently processes the whole folder instead of the selection.
INPUT_GROUP_CONFIG	per-track-layout config for folder-wide video runs
input types audio_tracks, subtitle_tracks, subtitle_edit	render real track pickers, driven by probing the file
config.perGroupTracks, config.folderKeepAll, config.perGroupAllFiles	opt into the folder track-picker behaviour — on script tasks, though the docs describe config as pipeline-only

Inputs reach a script twice: positionally in args order, and as INPUT_<NAME> environment variables.

Writing a task: copy an existing one

convert-audio is the plain template. transcribe-audio shows calling Officer's own API. extract-audio shows handling multiple streams. optimize-size shows the INPUT_INCLUDE helper.

Two ways a task does work:

1. Run a tool directly (ffmpeg, jq, …). Right when the work is just a command.
2. Call Officer's API, when the logic already exists server-side — transcription and OCR do this, so language detection, model config and output conventions stay in one place. Script tasks are given OFFICER_API_URL, OFFICER_API_HOST and OFFICER_AUTH_TOKEN for exactly this.

House style for file-processing tasks, worth keeping consistent:

• Never delete or modify the source; write output beside it.
• Handle a single file and a directory, recursively.
• Honour INPUT_INCLUDE.
• No caching. Re-running redoes the work and overwrites — and say so in the body, because it also overwrites edits.
• End with a summary line and a non-zero exit if anything failed.

Debugging "my task didn't run"

1. Does TASK.md parse? bun -e with getTaskByDirName from platform/src/servers/api/tasks/task-files.ts.
2. Does the trigger match? Extension matching is on the lowercased final extension only — no globs, no MIME.
3. Is the script executable, and does bash -n run.sh pass?
4. Run it directly with INPUT_* set, before blaming the platform.

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Things that will bite you

• The vision model hallucinates on textless images. A blank white PNG came back as "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." OCR output on an image with no text is invented, confidently. Never point OCR at a photo library.
• Whisper's translate mode only outputs English. It cannot translate into any other language. Transcription is therefore always in the source language; translating would mean a second pass through an LLM.
• Agents run unsandboxed as the owner, with --dangerously-skip-permissions. Deliberate — it is the owner's own machine. Don't add a jail without being asked. The old bwrap sandbox was removed.
• Schema changes use bun db:push, not migrations. drizzle-kit migrate has never run here; there is no __drizzle_migrations table. The schema code is the source of truth.
• PUBLIC_BUILD_ENV fails closed. Unset means hardened — origin checks, rate limits and password rules all on. Only an explicit dev/development relaxes them.
• index.html is a template. It carries __PUBLIC_URL__ placeholders; scripts/gen-index.ts writes the real index.gen.html at predev/prestart. Edit the template, then re-run bun gen:index — --watch will not do it for you.

Verify, don't assume

Much of what is written down about this codebase has drifted from what it does. Several bugs found recently were invisible in the code and obvious the moment something was actually run — a type assertion that lied about a third-party response, a language detector whose result was computed and then discarded, a menu entry pointing at a deleted screen.

Read the code, then run it. When reporting, say what you actually checked and what you didn't.