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Author SHA1 Message Date
61448b0c4e Keep in-repo agent scratch out of the build context and out of git (closes #27)
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The canonical .dockerignore and .gitignore both omitted the in-repo agent
scratch directory. On this fleet that directory holds one worktree per
in-flight agent -- an entire additional checkout of the repo each -- so under
`COPY . .` all of it reached the build context and the image. Measured on this
repo before the change: five planted scratch files, at every depth beneath the
directory, all present inside a probe image built from the real context.

Three consequences, only the first of which is about size. The context inflates
by a multiple of the repo. Another session's unreviewed and sometimes
uncommitted work is copied into a build artifact. And the directory is created
and destroyed constantly by tooling, so it invalidates `COPY . .` for reasons
that have nothing to do with this repo's content -- which is the accidental
cache protection described at length in the issue thread, and the reason this
change was sequenced behind the CHECK_EPOCH bust rather than landed alongside
the rest of the .dockerignore work.

The two entries are deliberately different shapes, because the two files have
different semantics and neither is derived from the other. In .dockerignore the
entry is anchored, `.claude`, with no `**/` prefix: the directory occurs exactly
once, at the context root, and the prefixed form additionally matches any nested
directory of that name. Measured rather than argued -- the `**/`-prefixed
control was built and enumerated too, and it removes prompts/.claude/ from the
context as well, which in a repo with a legitimately named nested directory
would silently delete it from the build. In .gitignore the entry is unanchored,
`.claude/`, because a .gitignore pattern already matches at every depth;
`git check-ignore -v` confirms it covering both .claude/ and prompts/.claude/,
so a `**/` prefix there would be redundant at best, and on an anchored pattern
it would be actively wrong.

It is not case-folded the way the neighbouring secret patterns are. Tooling
creates the directory in exactly one spelling, and a miss costs context bloat
rather than exposure, so the character-class treatment that the secret names
require would be noise here. The file says so, since the header comment is the
only part of this guidance a consuming repo actually receives.

The second half of this change is the consequence that ships broken silently.
Excluding .git means `git describe` cannot run in any build stage, and it fails
quietly there rather than erroring: `-X main.Version=` comes out empty, the
binary reports no version, and the build still exits 0. The Go template in
REPO_POLICIES.md had `ARG VERSION=dev` and never said where VERSION came from,
which is precisely the gap a reader fills in with `git describe` inside the
build. It now says: computed on the host, threaded in with `--build-arg
VERSION=...`, shown as a complete command rather than as two rules each
documenting half of one. script/docker and script/cibuild do it, with the same
discipline the epoch already has -- assignment on its own line, because a
failing command substitution inside an argument does not trip `set -e`, plus a
non-empty fallback so a build from an export with no .git reports `unknown`
rather than an empty string that reads as a successful version.

The scripts pass VERSION unconditionally rather than growing a per-repo variant.
This repo's Dockerfile declares no `ARG VERSION`, and BuildKit was measured
accepting the unconsumed arg silently -- no warning, no cache effect, confirmed
by the paired runs below in which the bootstrap layer still caches. The
alternative, leaving it to each repo, reintroduces the trap: a repo that needs a
version and finds no VERSION in its scripts writes `git describe` into the
Dockerfile, which is the failure being closed.

The same correction reaches the two Go documents that carry the GOLDFLAGS
pattern, since a `$(shell git describe)` evaluated inside a build stage is
exactly this empty version. Both are now `?=`, so an `ARG VERSION` in the
compiling stage arrives through the environment and wins. Leaving them as `:=`
would have left the corpus telling a reader one thing in the policy and the
opposite in the styleguide.

Both repo checklists gain the entries too. They are what an agent reads while
writing these files, so they are where the wrong shape actually gets written:
the .gitignore item is the one an existing repo never re-fetches, and it now
names `.claude/` explicitly along with the warning not to prefix it.

Verification, by enumerating a probe image rather than by reading the patterns.
Standalone minimal Dockerfile held outside the context, `--no-cache` scoped to
that one image, no prune of any kind. Before: all five planted scratch files in
the image, 42 files total. After: zero, 37 files total, with README.md,
script/check, prompts/NEW_REPO_CHECKLIST.md and a planted probe_src/app.md all
still present as positive controls, so the exclusion is a real exclusion and not
a COPY that stopped copying. Transferred context fell from 161.86kB to 68.82kB,
recorded as corroboration only: BuildKit reports a delta, not a total, and an
earlier run in this repo transferred 2.18kB while shipping 43 files.

The CHECK_EPOCH verification was re-run under the changed context, because the
context moved underneath the earlier measurement. Two consecutive script/cibuild
runs on an unchanged tree: run 1 in 17.07s, run 2 in 5.73s, both executing the
check layer with a distinct epoch and real prettier output from both lint and
fmt-check. The `RUN script/bootstrap` layer is CACHED in run 2, which is the
validity control -- it proves no concurrent prune landed between the runs and
that no --no-cache path was taken, so the check layer executing is the bust
working rather than a cold cache.

Planted files were removed afterwards and their absence confirmed against the
filesystem with `find`, not against `git status`, which cannot see them once
.gitignore covers the directory -- the same blind spot that made the earlier
secret exposure invisible.
2026-08-09 16:56:28 +00:00
fd78aeb003 Keep secrets out of the Docker build context at every depth (closes #29)
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The canonical .dockerignore was three lines -- .git, node_modules, .DS_Store
-- while the canonical Dockerfile does `COPY . .`, so a developer's local
.env, *.pem or *.key was shipped into the build context and could land in an
image layer. Nothing surfaced it because .gitignore covers those patterns, so
the files are invisible to every git-based check.

The obvious repair, copying .gitignore's secret patterns across, is worse than
the gap it closes. .dockerignore does not use .gitignore semantics: Docker
matches with moby/patternmatcher, which is filepath.Match semantics plus a `**`
extension compiled to a regexp. `*` does not cross `/`, and a pattern without
a leading `**/` is anchored at the build-context root. A file listing .env,
*.pem and *.key therefore reads as solved, reviews as solved, and protects
only the repository root, while config/.env and certs/server.key still ship.
The three-line file at least invited scrutiny; the transplanted form
manufactures confidence and stops anyone looking.

So every depth-independent pattern here carries the `**/` prefix and only
genuinely root-anchored entries stay unprefixed. `**/node_modules` fixes a
defect the three-line file had today for any nested node_modules,
independently of the secret exposure.

Coverage is not limited to the three patterns the issue names, because the
enumeration found more shapes reaching the image. `**/*.env` covers the
prod.env / local.env convention, which the .env and .env.* spellings miss
entirely; `.envrc` is a secrets file by direnv convention; *.p12 and *.pfx are
bundles carrying private keys; and id_rsa, id_dsa, id_ecdsa and id_ed25519 are
the extensionless SSH keys that were covered before only when someone happened
to append a .key suffix.

Matching is case-sensitive, so `**/*.key` does not match certs/SERVER.KEY,
which is reachable on the case-insensitive filesystems most laptops use.
Doubling each pattern with an ALL-CAPS twin is not the fix: measured against
the planted set it still ships certs/Server.Key and certs/Ca.Pem while reading
as though case were handled, which is this issue's failure mode restated in a
new place. The matcher supports character ranges, so every secret name is
written that way -- `**/*.[kK][eE][yY]`, `**/*.[pP][eE][mM]`,
`**/.[eE][nN][vV][rR][cC]`, `**/[iI][dD]_[rR][sS][aA]` and the rest. The
extensionless SSH keys and .envrc are folded for the same reason the
extensions are: on the very filesystems that make SERVER.KEY reachable, direnv
reads .ENVRC and ssh reads ID_RSA, so exempting them would have contradicted
the rule that justifies the folding. Since `*` matches the empty string,
`**/*.[eE][nN][vV]` already covers a bare .ENV and no separate literal .env
entry is needed; the literal one is gone rather than left to imply that case
is unhandled there.

Deliberately not covered: bare `key` and `pem` filenames, which no tool
produces and which collide with legitimate paths (a `**/key` pattern would
delete an internal/key/ package directory from the context); `**/id_*`, which
would match ordinary source such as id_generator.go and ID_MAP.go; and *.crt
and *.cer, which are public certificates rather than secrets and are sometimes
a legitimate build input. Each of those is planted as a positive control and
verified present in the image after the change.

The one predictable false positive is a committed env template: `**/*.env`
excludes example.env. The remedy travels with the file rather than living in a
review thread -- the header comment and the policy both say to re-include it
with a negation, `!docs/example.env`, and never to delete the pattern, which
would reopen the exposure for everything else it covers.

The OS and editor patterns are included on their own merits rather than by
mirroring .gitignore. None of them is ever a build input, and editor state in
particular churns under a developer's hands, so each one is a source of
`COPY . .` invalidation carrying no information about the source tree. Now
that the checks are keyed on CHECK_EPOCH rather than on accidental context
churn, there is no reason left to keep churn in the context. Language build
artifacts are deliberately absent: they are per-repo, and the file's header
comment tells consuming repos to add their own host-built binaries, which is
the case that actually bites -- a host `make build` drops a multi-megabyte
artifact into the context where .gitignore hides it from every git-based
check. That comment gives the anchored form explicitly, `/myapp` rather than
`**/myapp`, because the prefixed spelling also matches cmd/myapp/ and deletes
the package directory. The header comment is the only part of this guidance a
consuming repo actually receives, since it is vendored with the file.

.gitignore is untouched. Its semantics are the inverse: an unanchored pattern
already matches at any depth, so `**/`-prefixing it produces a file that is
wrong in a way that looks careful. That asymmetry is why "derive one from the
other" was the wrong instruction, and it is now written down in
REPO_POLICIES.md in both directions, together with the case-sensitivity rule,
the negation remedy, and the requirement to verify by enumerating the image
rather than by reading the patterns. Every consuming repo inherits
.dockerignore by copy, so the trap has to live where the next person looks,
not only be fixed once here. Both repo checklists gain the same requirements.

Verified by planting 130 secret files -- twenty-six name shapes, including
every capitalisation of .env, .env.*, prod.env, .envrc, id_rsa, id_ed25519,
ca.pem, server.key, bundle.p12 and bundle.pfx, at five depths from the context
root to a/b/c -- alongside nine positive controls, then building a standalone
probe image doing `COPY . .` and listing what actually landed inside it. The
patterns as first written leaked 35 of the 130: every .ENVRC, .Envrc, ID_RSA,
Id_Rsa, ID_ED25519, .ENV.PRODUCTION and .Env.Local, at all five depths. A
lowercase-only control leaks 80, so the probe is not vacuous. After this
change: zero, with all nine controls still present, including
internal/ID_MAP.go and certs/CA.CRT.

Transferred-context size is recorded but load-bearing on nothing: an earlier
run reported 2.18kB transferred while 43 files, five of them secrets, were in
the image. BuildKit transfers only the delta from the previous build, so the
number describes the transfer and not the contents.

Planted files were removed and their absence confirmed against the filesystem
rather than against `git status`, which could not have seen them.

`make docker` re-run after the change: the check layer executed rather than
being served from cache, so the CHECK_EPOCH verification still holds under the
altered build context.
2026-08-09 16:42:00 +00:00
efbac580f9 Add repo scaffolding to meet repository standards
Add .gitignore, LICENSE (MIT), Makefile, Dockerfile, .dockerignore,
and pin prettier via yarn lockfile for integrity-checked markdown
formatting. Update REPO_POLICIES.md self-reference to point to this
repo. Format markdown files with prettier.
2026-02-22 15:40:29 +01:00