/api/v1/version is not reliably public — an instance with REQUIRE_SIGNIN_VIEW
answers 403 — so naming a perfectly good URL was refused with "the server
answered 403" and whoever typed it had nothing to act on.
/api/healthz is Gitea's own health endpoint and answers before any
authentication, which is the whole point of it. Tried first, with version as
the fallback.
A 401 or 403 from either now counts as reachable. This step only asks whether
there is a Gitea at the address; whether the caller may READ it is the token
step's question, and failing here for that reason sends people looking for the
wrong problem.
The form asked for a URL and a token together, on a fresh instance, while the
machine in front of it often had both on disk already — somebody had run `tea
login` by hand.
Two changes.
One thing at a time: until the platform knows where Gitea is, a token cannot be
checked, because there is nothing to check it against. So the owner names the
instance first, and only then does the page ask for — or discover — a token.
That step now probes /api/v1/version unauthenticated, since demanding a token
to validate a URL refuses a good URL for the wrong reason and sends whoever
typed it looking for a credential problem.
And it reads tea's own config when the platform has no instance yet, offering
the URL it finds. A machine that already has a working login should not be
asked to retype what it can see.
Members skip the first step entirely — the instance is the owner's.
The frame answered {"error":"internal error"} on every request. The cause was
AES-GCM failing with "Unsupported state or unable to authenticate data" — the
token in service_connections was encrypted under a key that no longer exists,
because the platform mints its encryption key on first use and does not back it
up. The same loss took slskd, memos and gitea credentials on this project's own
server earlier today.
It presented as a broken sidecar. connectionState reported `configured: true`
because a ROW exists, so the panel skipped the form and went to the frame,
where every call threw. Nothing offered a way to fix it, and the connection
form was unreachable precisely because it only appears when unconfigured.
Now a named failure. `UnreadableCredentials` is distinguished from every other
error — a database that is down keeps its own message, or a real fault would be
reported as "re-enter your token" — and the panel shows the form saying the key
changed, nothing else is lost, and the URL is still there.
Verified by the platform itself refusing to decrypt: this is the state that
machine has been in all day.
Eleventh plugin out, and the first that is not a move. The seventeen files that
reimplemented a fraction of Gitea's interface were deleted rather than carried
across — each one a promise to keep pace with a project that moves faster than
this plugin will.
That removed a platform change nobody now has to build. useGiteaLocation read
:owner/:name/:tab/:item from five route patterns and a plugin gets two, so
extracting as-is would have needed the plugin system to declare extra routes.
Nothing inside an iframe needs a route, so the requirement went with the screen.
No regression window: gitea's router had been commented out of hono.ts since
2026-08-13 with api: [], and officer-gitea was running nowhere. The screen
rendered and every request 404'd.
The proxy is what makes the iframe possible, not decoration. Officer and Gitea
are different registrable domains, so a frame pointed straight at the instance
gets a login page whose cookie the browser drops as third-party. Through
Officer's origin it is first-party and survives; X-Frame-Options and CSP are
stripped, safe only because the frame is the origin the browser already
authenticated.
/_web/* forwards the browser's own cookies and injects NOTHING. The sidecar
holds an API token and injecting it there would show every user the owner's
view of every repository. It is used only by /_api/*.
Two doors, because an iframe's sub-resources carry no Authorization header:
the ordinary routes go through the platform's gate, and /_web/* is declared
unauthenticated and authenticates itself with a minted, path-scoped cookie —
32 random bytes against the user who asked, not dev-proxy's constant =1 which
anyone knowing the cookie name can set. Verifying it also sets `user`, because
createSidecarProxy fills X-Officer-User from it and the sidecar refuses a
request without one.
Ships an affordance: git for what git does, tea for pull requests and issues.
Nothing copies it into capabilities/ yet — gitea is that mechanism's first
customer.
officer