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booth/README.md
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vh 95228299bc feat(booth): kept boards — a .forever sentinel and a standing link board
Agent sessions hand the operator URLs and they drown in terminal
scrollback. The Booth is the right home for them — it already has the one
property that decides adoption, which is that a session can publish with
mkdir and cp, no API key, no schema, no deploy — but everything in it dies
in 24h.

So: a booth containing `.forever` is never swept, and renders in its own
Kept lane at the top of the index. Opt-in per booth, so the ephemeral
default is untouched and nobody inherits a cleanup chore. `rm` the
sentinel and the board rejoins the sweep; the CLI verbs are sugar over
exactly that, which keeps the filesystem-is-the-state model honest.

The pin is deliberately NOT wired into is_expired(). That stays a pure age
question feeding the `expires_in` countdown; only sweep_once() honours the
sentinel. Keeping expiry arithmetic and reaper policy apart means they
cannot drift into each other.

Kept cards are visually separated per Australis: a 2px top edge in aurora
blue, the one accent border the system sanctions. They show "kept" instead
of a countdown, and they deliberately lose the one-click wipe button — a ×
next to the durable stuff is a footgun, so removing a kept board is a
two-step act.

`booth link <url> [description]` appends to the standing `links` board,
creating and keeping it on first use. Entries carry provenance (handle or
hostname, plus a timestamp) because a bare URL is unreadable three days
later. The append is one printf of one line to an O_APPEND fd — atomic
under PIPE_BUF on POSIX — which matters because many agents post to one
board and interleaved half-lines would be the obvious failure mode.

Seven tests cover the sentinel: detection, survival of a sweep that wipes
its neighbour, the deliberate is_expired/sweep_once split, the listing
flag, the sentinel not inflating item counts, and both lane-rendering
directions. Two of them originally asserted on the bare strings "Kept" and
"kept-grid", which passed for the wrong reason — those also appear in the
inlined stylesheet served on every page — so they now assert the full
class attribute. 55 pass.

Also corrects the Homepage card's description, which advertised a flat 24h
TTL that is no longer the whole story.
2026-08-19 09:34:53 -07:00

180 lines
7.4 KiB
Markdown

# The Booth
A dead-simple standing web server for shuttling **ephemeral files** between the
operator and CC sessions — A/B renders, smoke-test screenshots, audio/video
samples, or anything you want to hand off. It works both directions:
- **Session → operator:** a session drops a folder of files on disk; the Booth
renders it as a browsable "booth".
- **Operator/anyone → pickup:** upload files through the browser (or `curl -F`)
and get a **human-readable pickup id** like `4-wombat` or `star-84`.
Either way it **wipes 24h after the last activity**. No database — the
filesystem *is* the state.
- **Live:** http://10.100.10.50:8090/ (nh3-dev) · linked from Homepage → *Apps → The Booth*
- **Data dir:** `~/booth-data/` on nh3-dev (one subfolder per booth)
- **TTL:** 24h, measured from the newest mtime in a booth's tree (it lives while
you're touching it, self-destructs 24h after you stop)
## How a session posts
A booth is **just a folder** under the data dir. Three ways, cheapest first:
```bash
# 1. On nh3-dev — the helper (services/booth/scripts/booth):
booth add my-run out/a.png out/b.png # creates booth + copies, prints URL
booth new my-run # empty booth, then cp/mv into ~/booth-data/my-run/
booth url my-run # just print the URL
booth ls # list booths
booth rm my-run # wipe now (TTL would anyway)
# 2. On nh3-dev — raw, no helper:
mkdir -p ~/booth-data/my-run && cp out/*.png ~/booth-data/my-run/
# -> http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/my-run/
# 3. From another host — rsync into the data dir:
rsync -a ./out/ nh3-dev:booth-data/my-run/
```
Then hand the operator `http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/my-run/`.
## Kept boards — the one exception to the 24h rule
A booth containing a **`.forever`** dotfile is **never swept**, and renders in
its own **Kept** lane at the top of the index (blue top edge, `★ kept` badge, no
countdown, no one-click wipe). Everything else is unchanged: the default is
still ephemeral, so nobody inherits a cleanup chore they didn't ask for.
```bash
booth keep my-board # drop the sentinel — exempt from the sweep, forever
booth unkeep my-board # remove it — the board rejoins the sweep
```
It is just a file, so the manual forms work identically and are the honest
mental model:
```bash
touch ~/booth-data/my-board/.forever # keep
rm ~/booth-data/my-board/.forever # unkeep
rm -rf ~/booth-data/my-board # delete outright, whenever you like
```
**Why this exists:** agent sessions hand the operator URLs — a booth of renders,
a PR, a dashboard — and they drown in terminal scrollback. Kept boards are where
those go instead.
### The standing link board
```bash
booth link <url> [description]
```
Appends one line to the **`links`** board (`$BOOTH_LINKS_BOARD`, default
`links`), creating it and marking it kept on first use. Each entry carries
provenance — who posted it and when — because a bare URL is unreadable three
days later. `links.md` renders as a readable page in the booth.
The append is a single `printf` of a single line to an `O_APPEND` fd, which is
atomic under `PIPE_BUF` on POSIX. That matters here specifically: many agents
post to one board, and interleaved half-lines would be the obvious failure.
Deliberately **not** a database. The board is a markdown file — editable with
any editor, greppable, and trivially prunable by hand, which is the whole point
of the Booth's filesystem-is-the-state model.
## Upload for pickup
The reverse direction — put files in through the web, pick them up by id:
- **Browser:** the index page has an *Upload files for pickup* panel
(drag-drop or click). Submit → you land on a booth with a **human-readable
id** (`4-wombat`, `star-84`) whose files each have a ⬇ download link.
- **curl (a remote session with no ssh to nh3-dev can use this too):**
```bash
curl -sS -i -F 'files=@out/a.png' -F 'files=@out/b.png' \
http://10.100.10.50:8090/upload | grep -i location
# Location: /b/star-84/ <- the pickup id
```
- **Pick up** at `http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/<id>/` (download links), or on
nh3-dev straight off disk at `~/booth-data/<id>/`.
Uploads are stamped as pickup booths (a `⬆ pickup` badge in the UI) and expire
on the same 24h TTL. Limits: `BOOTH_MAX_FILES` files (default 50) and
`BOOTH_MAX_UPLOAD_MB` total per submission (default 1024); filenames are reduced
to a safe basename (no path traversal).
## What a booth renders
- **Has its own `index.html`?** → served **verbatim** (its relative assets —
`chart.png`, `report.css` — resolve out of the same folder). Build whatever
page you want.
- **No `index.html`?** → **auto-gallery** of the folder's media:
- images (`png jpg jpeg gif webp avif svg bmp`) → `<img>` (click → full-screen
viewer with **Fit** / **1:1** — the toggle only appears when the image is
larger than the viewport — plus download and ✕/Esc back to the gallery)
- video (`webm mp4 ogv m4v mov`) → `<video controls>`
- audio (`mp3 wav ogg flac m4a opus aac`) → `<audio controls>`
- anything else → a download link
- **Captions:** a `<file>.txt` or same-stem `<stem>.txt` sidecar is folded in as
that item's caption — the natural way to label an A/B pair:
```
a.png b.png
a.txt "baseline" b.png.txt "cudaMallocAsync (winner)"
```
## Routes
| Route | Purpose |
|---|---|
| `GET /` | Index — one card per booth (newest first), with expiry countdown |
| `GET /b/<name>/` | A booth (its `index.html`, else auto-gallery) |
| `GET /b/<name>/<file>` | Serve a file out of the booth |
| `POST /upload` | Upload files → new pickup booth; 303-redirects to `/b/<id>/` (id in `Location`) |
| `POST /b/<name>/delete` | Wipe a booth (the UI's "Wipe now" button) |
| `DELETE /b/<name>` | Wipe a booth (curl/API) |
| `GET /healthz` | `{ok, ttl_hours, booths}` — Homepage siteMonitor target |
## Ops
Runs as a **user-level** systemd service on nh3-dev (no root, no Docker),
alongside the other fleet sidecars (herald, zellij-web, ttyd).
```bash
systemctl --user status booth.service
systemctl --user restart booth.service
journalctl --user -u booth.service -f # sweeper logs "[booth] swept …"
```
Config is env in the unit (`booth.service`):
`BOOTH_DATA_DIR`, `BOOTH_TTL_HOURS`, `BOOTH_HOST_LABEL`, `BOOTH_SWEEP_INTERVAL_MIN`,
`BOOTH_MAX_UPLOAD_MB` (default 1024), `BOOTH_MAX_FILES` (default 50).
### Install / update
```bash
cd services/booth
uv venv && uv pip install fastapi "uvicorn[standard]" jinja2 python-multipart # runtime deps
cp booth.service ~/.config/systemd/user/booth.service
systemctl --user daemon-reload && systemctl --user enable --now booth.service
```
Code runs straight from this checkout (the unit's `WorkingDirectory` /
`ExecStart` point here), so "deploy an update" = edit + `systemctl --user
restart booth.service`.
### Tests
```bash
cd services/booth && uv pip install pytest httpx && .venv/bin/python -m pytest -q
```
## Notes / non-goals
- **No auth.** LAN/WG-internal only, ephemeral content — don't drop secrets in a
booth, and note anyone on the LAN can upload (bounded by the size/file limits).
Uploaded files are served back with their own content-type, so an uploaded
`index.html` renders as a page (a feature for custom reports; keep it in mind).
- Booth names with `/`, `..`, or a leading `.` are rejected; file serving and
uploaded filenames are guarded against path traversal and symlink escape.