Hostile-self-review weakest-spot #2: if the devops-engineer persona
is ever renamed, the canary will go red even if everything else is
fine. Add an inline comment pointing the next editor at both files
that must update together (auto-sync-main-to-staging.yml's git
config + this canary's EXPECTED_PERSONA + the staging branch
protection's push_whitelist_usernames).
No behaviour change — comment-only.
While verifying Phase 4, found a real flaw in Probe 3 (`git ls-remote
refs/heads/staging`). On a public repo (which molecule-core is), Gitea
falls back to anonymous read on bad auth, so `ls-remote` succeeds even
with a junk token. The probe was therefore green-lighting rotated
tokens — false-green, the worst possible canary failure mode.
Rewritten to use `git push --dry-run` of the current staging SHA back
to `refs/heads/staging`:
- Push always authenticates (auth-gated on smart-protocol handshake,
before the dry-run can compute the empty-diff).
- NOP by construction: pushing the current tip back to itself is
"Everything up-to-date" with exit 0.
- Bad token → "Authentication failed", exit 128.
- Doesn't reach pre-receive (where branch-protection authz runs), so
scope is "auth only" — matches the design intent (failure mode B);
authz already covered daily by branch-protection-drift.yml.
Implementation note: `git push` requires a local repo. Spinning up a
fresh `git init` in a tempdir (~1KB, ~50ms) instead of pulling the
full repo via actions/checkout — actions/checkout would clone
~hundreds of MB for what amounts to "a place to run git from."
Local mutation tests pass:
- Real token: "Everything up-to-date" exit 0
- Junk token: "Authentication failed" exit 128 with actionable
::error:: messages pointing at the runbook
Header comment + runbook step-mapping updated to reflect new probe
shape. Refs: #72
The two API probes used the unsafe shape rejected by
lint-curl-status-capture.yml (per feedback_curl_status_capture_pollution):
status=$(curl ... -w '%{http_code}' ... || echo "000")
When curl exits non-zero (transport error, --fail-with-body 4xx/5xx),
the `-w` already wrote a code; the `|| echo "000"` then APPENDS another
"000", yielding "000000" or "409000" — passes shape checks while looking
right.
Switch to the canonical safe shape (set +e + tempfile + cat):
set +e
curl ... -w '%{http_code}' >code_file 2>/dev/null
set -e
status=$(cat code_file 2>/dev/null || true)
[ -z "$status" ] && status="000"
Inline comment in both probe steps explains the lint constraint so
the next editor doesn't re-introduce the bad pattern.
Refs: #72, lint failure on PR #77 (1/22 red → 22/22 expected green)
Adds a 6h-cron synthetic check that fires the auth surface used by
auto-sync-main-to-staging.yml (PR #66) and emits a red workflow
status when AUTO_SYNC_TOKEN has drifted out of validity. Closes
hostile-self-review weakest-spot #3 from PR #66 (token-rotation
detection latency).
Read-only verification — no writes, no synthetic merge commits, no
canary branch noise. Three probes:
1. GET /api/v1/user → token authenticates as devops-engineer
2. GET /api/v1/repos/molecule-ai/molecule-core → read:repository scope
3. git ls-remote refs/heads/staging → exact HTTPS auth path used by
actions/checkout in the real auto-sync workflow
Hard-fail on missing AUTO_SYNC_TOKEN secret on both schedule and
workflow_dispatch — per feedback_schedule_vs_dispatch_secrets_hardening,
a silent soft-skip would make the canary itself drift-invisible (the
sweep-cf-orphans #2088 lesson). Operator runbook in workflow header.
Token reuse: same AUTO_SYNC_TOKEN as the workflow under monitor; no
new credential introduced. Read-only paths only.
Refs: #72, hostile-self-review #66
