restore inspect answers "what would a restore from here bring?" without writing
anything: hosts, apps with sizes, and the domains — read out of the
system-config snapshot with engineDumpFile, the same way the preflight reads an
app manifest. Knowing a backup hands you six domains of which four point
elsewhere, before committing, is the difference between a rebuild and a
surprise.
restore connect is the WebUI entry point: creates the location from a base64
payload, redeems the repository password from the single-use secret channel,
inspects. Deliberately does not engineInitLocation — every other path that
creates a location initialises it because it is about to write there; this one
reads a repository that already exists. This is what unblocks the constraint
app_portable.sh records: a .lpapp could live in the WebUI because nothing
secret crosses from browser to host, and the repository restore could not. The
secret:<ref> channel is that missing piece.
A wrong password is the ordinary case and the user retries, so a failed connect
removes the location it just made. Otherwise every attempt left another
half-configured destination behind.
Three things found by using it:
- locationRemove never worked. It unlinked as the container user, but
configs/ is manager-owned, so it was always denied — and the result was
never checked, so isSuccessful printed anyway and a "removed" location came
back on the next listing. Now runInstallOp, and the directory is checked.
- webuiSecretSweep had no callers. An abandoned flow left its repository
password on disk forever. The sweep now runs in /api/setup/secret before
each write, tied to the one event guaranteed to happen.
- Adoption took the WebUI down. config-adopt chowned every adopted file to
manager:manager 0640, and webui_logins is bind-mounted into the container,
which then could not read its own credentials: exit 137 with no log line.
It also clamped every parent directory it passed through, closing
configs/webui and configs/backup to the container user.
The fix is a principle, not a special case: a restore replaces the CONTENT
of a config file and nothing else. The live install already knows who may
read each one. Adoption preserves the destination's ownership and mode,
defaults closed only for a file that did not exist, and never
re-permissions a directory it passes through.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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