`.text()` decompresses, so the rewritten HTML goes back plain — while the
headers still said `content-encoding: gzip`. The next hop believed the header,
tried to gunzip plain text, and failed with ZlibError.
Which surfaced as "gitea unreachable": a 502 naming nothing, while a direct
curl to the sidecar returned 200 the whole time.
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.
Gitea believes it lives at /. Its pages are full of root-absolute links, and
inside the frame those resolve against OFFICER'S origin — the page renders
perfectly and falls apart on the first click.
Four places a URL hides, each failing differently: href/src/action attributes,
window.config.appSubUrl, Location headers, and absolute URLs built from
ROOT_URL.
appSubUrl is the highest-value line. Gitea already supports being hosted under
a subpath and its client JS prefixes every URL it builds with that value, so
filling it in makes Gitea correct ITSELF rather than by interception.
The ROOT_URL case needs Gitea's public origin, which the sidecar does not have
— it fetches from loopback. Rather than add a second setting that can disagree
with Gitea's own, appUrlOrigin reads it out of the page: Gitea emits "appUrl"
in the same config blob as appSubUrl.
Not rewritten, deliberately: JavaScript bodies, because a blanket rewrite of
absolute paths inside a script corrupts strings that are not URLs; and clone
URLs, which must keep working for whoever copies them.
/_web/* now forwards by hand rather than through createSidecarProxy. That
forwarder passes three headers and nothing else, on purpose — it is shared by
every sidecar and its restraint is what makes it safe to reuse. It strips
cookies, and this path is nothing but cookies. Loosening it for gitea would
loosen it for the wallet.
Eighteen tests, the only part of this plugin verifiable without a running
Gitea. One caught a real bug: rewriteAbsolute turns a full URL into <base>/path
and the attribute pass then prefixed it again.
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