Follows the portal: the noun is "instance" everywhere the app says it —
UI strings, CLI output, error details, docs and comments. The wire keys
(`instance_id`, `instance_token`) and the hub route this calls move with it.
An existing cloud.json is adopted rather than refused: without the key
alias the dataclass fails to parse, which the caller swallows and reads as
"never enrolled" instead of "reconnect".
`instance_key` on a node type becomes `target_key`. It means the outside
thing a node points at, which is a different sense of the word, and keeping
both would put two meanings of "instance" in one codebase.
A `webpush` alert channel, and the PWA it needs to arrive. The payload is
encrypted to the subscription (RFC 8291) and the request signed with this
installation's own keypair (RFC 8292), both over `http-ece` — `pywebpush`
does the same in one call but brings `requests` and `aiohttp` with it, two
HTTP stacks beside httpx on a machine that may be a Raspberry Pi.
The manifest and the worker are hand-written rather than `vite-plugin-pwa`:
there is nothing worth precaching when the page carrying the credential is
`no-store`, so the worker handles `push` and `notificationclick` and nothing
else. `registration.scope` is the app's root in both places it runs, which is
why the payload carries no URL.
A run finishing in error is the first event worth waking someone for; `ok`
and `cancelled` describe to nothing, so a nightly batch that works stays
quiet. The events were already on the bus — only the filter changed.
`WEBPUSH_FILE` is a derived path, so the keypair lands on the data volume
with the alerts beside it. Off it, a rebuild would silently stop every phone
being notified: the key they subscribed against would be gone.
Runs: a run can now be deleted (DELETE /runs/{id}, cancelling a live one
first), exported as csv from the screen's own filters, and its flow label
opens the flow. Its "Parameters" panel became "Inputs" and lists every
input the flow declares, marking the ones that took the flow's own value
rather than the run's — the comparison table resolves the same defaults
instead of printing "unset".
Home reads brain, dashboards, health, flows: the mosaic is one full-width
scrolling strip, and the flows list and the flow-activity rollups merged
into a single left-joined table so a flow's state and its numbers sit on
one row.
Charts take a drag to narrow the x window and a double click or tap to
come back out. UplotChart holds the scale and passes resetScales:false
while a window is held, which is what the old comment said made this
impossible.
`GET /api/v1/search/` hands the client one flat index of everything worth
jumping to — flows and the nodes inside them, dashboards and the widgets on
them, panels, secrets, modules, workers and alert channels — and cmdk matches
it in the browser, so results narrow while typing without a round trip per
keystroke. A node hit is the one thing no list endpoint could answer: it opens
its flow with that node in focus.
The panel is reached from **Search** above Documentation in the sidebar, or
⌘K anywhere. The flow canvas palette moves to ⌘P, being the narrower of the two.
The panels dialog gains an address (`/dashboards?panels`) so a panel hit has
somewhere to land, and the sidebar logo gets `shrink-0`: the rail's width
animates while the logo is already back, and a flex item short of room is
squeezed rather than clipped.
Four tabs over three cards was navigation for its own sake, and the two shells
disagreed about what a settings screen looks like. It is one grid of cards now,
matching the portal: the account card carries changing a password and deleting
the account in its footer, appearance is a card with one row, and remote access
— an operator's concern, not a personal preference — is a card of its own for a
superuser.
SettingRow, alert-dialog and UserAvatar come across from the portal, so an
account renders the same face in both shells.
`resources` was reachable from the SDK and the API and nowhere else, and
`node_queued` was published to nothing at all — so a node waiting for a machine
looked exactly like a node that had hung, which is the failure the event was
added for.
The node panel gets a Resources section: a size by name, the numbers for a node
that wants its own, and how long it is expected to take. Picking a flavor drops
the numbers, because saying both is two answers and the engine refuses it.
A queued node draws a neutral dot rather than one of the three status colours —
it is not running, it did not go well, and it did not go wrong; it is idle with
a reason, which the tooltip gives.
And a Workers screen, which is the first UI for any of this: every machine the
engine can reach with what is free of each, what is attached, what a cluster
has been asked for, and the sizes, editable. `fluksio status` grew a line of
the same.
The demo's training node already preferred a GPU worker, which was exactly the
declaration that used to be dropped, so it now says how much of that machine it
takes as well.
The workflow this serves: make a venv, install what you work with, then `pip
install fluksio` into the same one. Building a second environment beside it
was exactly wrong — the packages the nodes need are already here, and the
Modules screen was asking for them a second time.
`NODE_VENV=auto` (the default) adopts that venv. It declines in the three
cases where adopting would be wrong: `managed` says otherwise, a managed venv
already exists and may hold packages somebody installed on purpose, or the
engine is not running from a venv at all. The images set `managed`, since the
venv in them holds the app and nothing of anybody else's.
An adopted venv is never written to. `uv pip sync` makes a venv hold exactly
the manifest, so pointed at somebody's own environment it uninstalls their
work and the engine with it — `sync()` refuses outright and `reconcile()`
returns before it can be called at startup, which is where that would have
happened first. The Modules screen lists what is installed and drops its
editor; `pip` is how that environment changes.
`fluksio serve` now names the interpreter node code runs on, which is the
thing a data scientist most needs to know at that moment. `fluksio-worker`
already defaulted `--python` to its own interpreter, so a GPU box works the
same way — that was only ever undocumented.
- Home puts the dashboards beside the flows: two equal-height columns,
capped and scrollable, most recently worked on first. Each tile is a
schematic footprint built from the stored widget placements.
- Flows and dashboards can be picked by long press or ctrl-click; the
create button becomes a trash and one dialog covers the batch.
- The offline banner is drawn on the body so it centres on the viewport,
and the live socket now releases the offline latch a stray 503 set.
- A boot spinner before React's first commit, a router pending screen for
code-split pages, and skeletons where an empty list used to flash.
`make lint-frontend` was `biome check --write --unsafe ./` — a lint target that
reformatted the whole tree rather than checking it, which is why every parallel
change in this repo has had to work around it. `lint` checks now and a new
`format` writes. The pre-commit hook and CI needed no edit at all: both call
`bun run lint`, so they became checks the moment its meaning changed.
`app/Makefile` assigned DOMAIN from .env, and a plain assignment beats an
inherited environment variable and is not exported — so `cd app && make
dev-local` served localhost while the same checkout's tests targeted the
configured domain. `export DOMAIN ?=` gives the lattice that was intended:
command line, then environment, then .env.
Alongside: the backend's htmlcov bind mount created that directory as root, so
`make test-backend` died on the coverage step after every test had passed,
which reads like a test failure and is not one. The alerts screen's copy of
ALERTING_EVENTS is now checked by a test rather than trusted. And the shard
comment claimed two spec files where there are nine.
A node's error cleared the moment it ran again, so a failure that genuinely
fired an alert could leave no trace on the canvas by the time anyone looked.
The engine records it now — on the node's status, so it survives a reload and
every client agrees — and reading the traceback is what clears it. The seam is
the event bus, which is where every failing path already meets: a queued live
run, an explicit run, a preview, and a single triggered node all publish
`node_error`, while the controller's own observer would have seen only one of
them.
That was half the confusion. The other half: clicking a failed neuron on Home
often landed on a flow where everything looked fine. Nodes merge into one
neuron by instance key — every InfluxDB node pointing at the same bucket is one
neuron — and the click went to whichever flow contributed a member first, not
the one that failed. It now goes to the failing member and selects it, and the
canvas marks a failing node rather than leaving it to the dot alone.
The inject node emitted one payload to every port it declared, whatever their
types, so an inject on a bool port carrying the text "true" raised at publish
time. Each port gets its own field now, typed and parsed by that port's dtype,
and remembers what it last sent. A port that is renamed carries its value with
it; one that is removed takes its value with it. An inject written before this
keeps emitting exactly what it did.
The derived-cron chip also appeared on the delay node, where `interval` is a
rate limit and a schedule derived from it means nothing.
A dashboard went live the moment it was created — an empty document straight to
the panels — while a new flow starts as a draft. It now works the way flows do:
published means `dashboard.json` exists, so every dashboard on every running
installation is already published and nothing needs migrating. Only the ones
created from here on start as drafts.
Mirroring FlowStore turned up a latent 500: discarding the draft of a dashboard
that had never been published unlinked its only file, and the read that followed
raised out of a 200 handler. It answers 400 now, the way a flow does.
Publishing all of them was 2N requests, because a publish has to name the
version it expects and the summaries did not carry one. They do now — and so do
the flow summaries, which had the same defect nobody had written down.
A panel had no way to hear about any of this. A publish, or a change to which
dashboards a panel carries, now puts one event on the bus and the screen
refetches what changed: no reload, so a wall display never blanks or asks for
its credential again. The subtle half is that a socket's message allowlist was
computed once at handshake — a reassigned panel would have fetched its new
document and then shown tiles that never updated.
The panels dialog logged non-superusers out. Every write in it needs a
superuser, not only the checkboxes the report mentioned, so the dialog is
read-only for everyone else. The logout itself was `main.tsx` treating 403 as a
dead session, against the contract deps.py spells out: only a 401 ends a
session, and a 403 now says so rather than silently signing someone out.
A panel is one screen and the ordered set of whole dashboards it shows, so a
hallway tablet and a workshop tablet carry different sets without either
dashboard knowing about the other. More than one and the device draws a rail
to switch between them — the same rail the editor puts on screen, because the
wall has it and it takes room off the canvas.
A screen has no keyboard, so it pairs rather than logs in: it shows a
six-character code, somebody approves it against a panel from the dashboards
overview, and the credential that mints reaches that panel's published
dashboards and the message endpoints its widgets speak, and nothing else.
Deleting the panel revokes it.
Closes the per-device view and the kiosk credential; supersedes the
multi-page/multi-section UI, since a page is now a dashboard of its own.
The socket belonged to whichever hook instance ran its effect first. Passive
effects run children before parents, so on Home that was the brain graph rather
than the shell: navigating to a sibling route unmounted the graph, which closed
the socket, while the shell kept the reference count above zero. From there the
page was deaf for the rest of its life, with nothing left to reconnect it.
A module-level connection with a real refcount replaces it — connect on the
first subscriber, disconnect on the last — and the hook is a thin subscription
with the same signature, correct under StrictMode's mount/unmount/mount.
A 1008 now reconnects instead of returning silently: the token is read afresh
per attempt, and three consecutive rejections fall through to the caller's auth
handler so a revoked session surfaces rather than spins.
The snapshot's emit counts are read into a store of their own, apart from the
live count, so a graph that connects into a busy engine is drawn as busy without
every neuron claiming it just fired. The neuron and edge pulses now key off a
change seen while they were mounted, so returning to Home no longer replays
every emission of the session.
Home gets a live indicator for the case none of this can fix: quiet while the
socket is up, and named in words when it is down, since HTTP polling keeps the
rest of the page looking current.
The editor's mount-time fitView animated from React Flow's default viewport,
which read as the graph swiping in from the corner on every open. The first
fit is instant now, later ones stay animated, and a scaleIn wrapper gives the
same entrance the brain view has — with a re-measure on completion so the
handle bounds are not stored mid-scale.
Home only renders the brain band once some flow has nodes, so a fresh install
no longer reserves a screenful of empty space above the flows card.
A superuser-only tab that redeems a claim code and shows the link's state. It
names the account a remote session acts as, because that is the thing being
granted and the person granting it should see it spelled out.
The canvas lays itself out: a layered graph, left to right on a desktop and
top to bottom on a phone, with room reserved for the value each edge carries.
Nodes cannot be dragged and `NodeDef.position` is gone from the document —
a graph nobody can arrange is one worth keeping small, which is what keeps
flows atomic. Endpoints join the same layout, so their lanes and the
localStorage that remembered where they were dragged go too.
Mobile, per the new Responsive section of DESIGN-GUIDELINES.md: the dock caps
its width and wraps instead of running off the screen, the dashboard stacks
into one column rather than shrinking a wall panel to a fifth of its size, and
Home stops widening its grid track past the viewport. A Playwright project at
a phone's width fails the build when a screen no longer fits.
Along the way: publish is the checkmark that was already there rather than a
button that appears and disappears, with discard beside it on both the flow
and the dashboard; the brain reveals a neuron's name on the first tap; and the
port sparklines get room to breathe.
A series, record or list message declares its shape instead of riding
DType.JSON, so a widget binds a shape rather than some JSON and a wrong
binding is refused before anything runs. A list declares its item type,
which is what keeps list[float] expressible for a pipeline.
On top of that: an agenda over a list, a notification over a record, and
a dashboard alert channel that publishes engine faults as one — so a
panel can show what went wrong without a flow wiring it by hand.
Also: only None means a node published nothing, a falsy value of the
wrong shape is now the named error it always should have been; and the
gauge's readout says its size is viewBox geometry rather than type scale.
Both overviews carried the same toolbar twice, left-aligned, with a search
field permanently taking a row of width. One `OverviewToolbar` now serves
them: the search folds into an icon and expands again on click (Escape puts
it away and hands focus back), create is a `+`, and everything sits right of
the page. Each page keeps its own create dialog — the toolbar only renders
the trigger — so the testids the runtime spec and the capture script drive
stayed where they were.
Dashboards get the flow store's draft/publish split. The editor autosaves
`dashboard.draft.json` beside `dashboard.json`; `/view/{name}`, `bindings_for`
and `history_requirements` keep reading the published file, so a wall panel
sees an edit only once someone publishes it. `POST /dashboards/{name}/publish`
and `/discard` mirror the flow routes down to the version precondition and the
409, `GET /dashboards/{name}?draft=true` is what the editor asks for, and the
dock grows the same Publish button — which flushes a queued save first, so an
autosave in flight is not published around. Creating a dashboard still writes
the published file directly: an empty document on a panel is harmless, and it
keeps the store free of a never-published case.
"Publish all" is a checkmark in the toolbar, live only when something actually
has `has_draft`. A summary carries no version and publish needs the one it is
based on, so each document's detail is read immediately before its publish —
honest against a stale list, and no version-less backend path to maintain.
Failures are counted rather than swallowed: three of five fails says so and
names the three.
The health screen was fixed at 24 hours everywhere except its lists, which
were fixed at nothing: `failuresQueryOptions` read the newest 100 rows and
`HealthActivity` filtered them client-side, so on a busy engine the failures
list covered whatever few minutes 100 rows happened to span while the chart
beside it spanned a day — and pinning an older minute showed an empty card.
One `RangePicker` now sits on the Health heading and governs the whole block:
the tiles, the flow table, both charts and both lists. Presets are 1h / 6h /
24h / 7d — the collector prunes at `OBS_RETENTION_DAYS` (30), so a week is
behind the last one. The longer windows ask for coarser buckets, since a week
of minute rollups is ten thousand points nobody can see.
Failures get the escape hatch the runs already had: a pinned minute is asked
for with `since`/`until` rather than filtered out of what is held, and the
list itself is bound to the selected range. `RUN_DEPTH`/`EVENT_DEPTH` become
one `LIST_DEPTH`, which now buys coverage of the window on screen instead of
a fixed newest-N — narrowing the range is what makes the same rows reach the
whole of it. The "Failures (24h)" tile counts errors over the selected window
from the rollups the table is drawn from, so tile, column and chart agree.
The node-panel and edge trend curves get no picker. They are a Redis ring of
the last 120 values per message with no window to ask for, so hovering one
reveals what it actually shows — how many readings, and the span they cover.
Home is the one overview now: the brain graph flat across the top, the flow
switches, then the health sections. The /brain and /health routes and their
sidebar entries are gone.
- charts report their cursor and clicks, so hovering one filters the list
beside it to that minute and a click pins it until Escape or Clear
- chart values round to about three significant digits, the legend mounts
under the plot so it can wrap without leaving the card, and axis ticks
shorten past a thousand
- the embedded brain leaves the wheel to the page rather than zooming
- number fields no longer draw their up/down spinner (NOTEPAD)
The worker script is handed to the interpreter by path, so app/flow was
sys.path[0] for every node: `import queue` got the engine's. It now drops
its own directory before anything else imports, and runs with the
deployment's credentials scrubbed out of its environment.
Also: reload builds off the event loop, the pool wakes what is blocked on
it when it stops, a refused metrics flush is kept for the next one rather
than dropped, and the cascade events are paired through failures.
A second bus subscriber folds executions, errors, timings and queue lag
into per-minute rollups, keeps failures with their traceback and an audit
trail of who published what, and records one row per cascade — manual runs
and previews included, under an id of their own that writes no idempotency
markers. Read back through /observability/*, which always answers 200 so a
degraded engine still renders its own health screen.
Also fixes two things found on the way: node-health alerts read `status`
where the engine publishes `health`, so a device dropping never alerted
anyone, and the Redis queue reported `parked: 0` whatever was held.
User code no longer execs in the engine. A pool of persistent worker
subprocesses speaks one JSON object per line; the controller installs a
proxy as the node's function, so every execution path funnels through it
and the pipeline is untouched. A crash costs one subprocess, a per-node
timeout is a kill, and cancelling from the canvas is that same kill.
The workers run a venv of the user's own on the data volume, filled from
a pip manifest versioned beside the flows. Applying it retires the
workers and rebuilds, so a package lands without restarting the engine.
One shell for both editors. Flows and dashboards each get a searchable
overview under the padded shell, their editors move to the full-bleed
canvas, and the floating chrome is shared: a title bar that only says
what you are looking at, and a bottom dock carrying everything else —
the flow bar's status, settings and Publish moved down there, the
add-flow button moved to the overview.
Dashboards gain the rest of M4's visualization work:
- widgets are picked by clicking them, with the header as the drag
handle so a slider still slides and a switch still flips while
editing; settings moved into the flows' SidePanel
- react-grid-layout for drag and edge-resize, so the stored x/y finally
mean something; a dashboard nobody arranged is shelf-packed once
- a per-dashboard grid size, so a panel can be matched to its screen
- the chart widget, drawn with uPlot: several messages on one axis, fed
from the stored history plus the live socket tail, coloured from the
new --chart-1..5 ramp
- /view/{name}: the URL a wall panel is pointed at — no sidebar, no
footer, no editing, and no editor code, since routes are split
- a widget wired to a payload type it cannot carry, or wired to nothing
at all, carries the same red dot a failing node does; the picker
records the type it bound and WidgetDef refuses a mismatch on save
An agent that registered itself was invisible, and withdrawing one meant
deleting rows or rotating the signing key. It now sits next to Users, with
the live-token count that tells an approved agent from one that only
registered.
Two backends that had no way in: secrets could only be set through the API,
and alerting could only be configured by hand-editing its file. Both are
engine-wide operator settings rather than personal ones, so they get sidebar
entries of their own instead of tabs under the per-user Settings — and the
missing-secret error now names the place the page actually is.
Widgets bind to a message name and read it live off the socket the editor
already had — lifted out of the flow editor so a dashboard route gets the
same values, which also gives the home page live data for free.
The input widgets close the loop the other way: a slider publishes into
the graph and whatever consumes that message runs. Verified end to end in
the running app — moving a slider set a flow input, and the stat bound to
what the flow computed from it followed.
View mode is plain CSS grid. A wall panel that only displays should not
download the code that lets someone drag things around, and it now does
not. Editing is a widget picker, a per-widget width control and a
settings card fed by the message catalog.
No new dependencies: the slider is a range input, the gauge is an arc,
and the markdown is a five-line subset. Charts are the one widget still
missing — they need a charting library and the chart tokens the design
guidelines reserved — so they are stored and validated but not offered.
Flows can now be taken off the engine and put back. Stopped state lives in a
runtime.json beside the flow, not in the flow document: the canvas autosaves
that document, so a stopped flow would otherwise start itself again on the
next edit. A stopped flow gets no subscriptions, schedules or webhooks, its
nodes are skipped by the scheduler, and running it answers 409. Pausing holds
a flow's nodes while its values keep arriving, so the canvas still shows what
is coming in.
Node code is user code and print is how it says things, so stdout is teed
through a contextvar sink active only during a node execution — one event per
execution, capped, so a chatty node cannot outrun the stream. A node that
fails sends its traceback the same way, trimmed to the author's own frames.
The dock gains a logs panel and a pause control; the dashboard replaces its
placeholder with what is running, stopped or failing; the edge inspector can
send the last message again.
Single-stepping is deferred and noted: the scheduler keeps no progress between
calls, so a step button would re-run the same node rather than advance.
The footer was a user card with the theme picker and log out buried in
its dropdown. It is now two plain entries, Settings and Log Out, and the
theme moved into the settings page as its own tab.
The dark sidebar never matched the canvas because _canvas.tsx painted
bg-card across the whole viewport underneath it, so the floating
panel's bg-card/80 resolved to card over card and its gutter was card
too. Nothing there should paint a surface; the panel now reads the same
as the other frosted chrome.
The superuser guard sliced the first three tabs, which silently changed
meaning when a fourth arrived.
- MQTT nodes failed to build: the topic map was renamed to talk in ports, but
__slots__ still declared the old name, so every MQTT node raised
AttributeError. Building one of each node type is now a test, since __slots__
makes this failure invisible until someone places the node.
- Port names offer the messages already in play: everything published is worth
reading, and an input nobody provides yet is worth publishing. A message only
connects when both ends spell it the same way, so choosing beats typing.
- Adding a port focuses its name field.
- Dragging onto an input that already reads something offers the extra port as
well as the replacement — an MQTT or InfluxDB node usually wants both.
- The template's Item model, its routes, screens and table are gone.
The submodule collapse was only half applied: .gitmodules was deleted but
backend/ and frontend/ were still recorded as gitlinks, so none of their
files were tracked. Replace the gitlinks with the real trees.
Also untrack .env (it carried placeholder secrets) in favour of a tracked
.env.example, drop the committed __pycache__, and narrow the blanket *.png
ignore that would have swallowed design assets.
stroblme
Melvin Strobl