# Ekklesia

Ekklesia is an open, modular church technology platform for composing backend capabilities
into independently developed dashboards, websites, mobile apps, kiosks, displays, and other
surfaces.

## Current status

Phase 3 is complete, and Phase 4A (Core identity foundation), Phase 4B (identity HTTP transport),
Phase 4C (Core authorization), Phase 5A (module authorization integration), Phase 5B (module HTTP
transport), and Phase 5C (module database access) have landed. Phase 5D (public request perimeter
hardening against an independent security audit) is in progress; pass 1 of 5 has landed — see
below. **Phase 5D is not complete, and Phase 6 (Surface work) remains blocked until every audit
finding is resolved and a final re-audit passes.** The repository includes
public module contracts, independently versioned capabilities, static module manifests,
deterministic automatic discovery, compiled server loading, a staged capability registry,
dependency-ordered lifecycle with rollback, module-owned Drizzle table contracts, deterministic
schema aggregation, and a cloneable backend-only module template. Migration artifacts have
module-owned Drizzle contracts, deterministic offline discovery, explicit destructive-change
declarations, and exact checksums. Core provides read-only applied-history planning and a locked,
whole-batch transactional PostgreSQL runner with exact external destructive approval matching. A
hermetic live PostgreSQL suite proves history, rollback, statement breakpoints, advisory-lock
concurrency and release, exact destructive approvals, and sanitization against the production
adapter. A Core-owned `pnpm doctor` dashboard combines the existing static discovery and read-only
migration-planning services into one concise readiness report.

Phase 4A added Core-owned identity foundations: a Core-owned Better Auth database schema
(`ekklesia_core_user`, `ekklesia_core_session`, `ekklesia_core_account`,
`ekklesia_core_verification`), a first-class Core-owned migration source that coexists with
module-owned migrations under the exact same migration system, minimal opaque-identity contracts
in `@ekklesia/contracts`, and an explicit Better Auth construction boundary in Core. See
[Identity](docs/development/identity.md) and
[ADR 0010](docs/architecture/decisions/0010-core-identity-and-better-auth-adoption.md).

Phase 4B adds identity HTTP transport: a minimal Hono-based `apps/api` composition root
(`pnpm api:start`) mounts Better Auth at `/api/auth/*` and exposes `GET /api/v1/principal` behind
Core's own Fetch-compatible identity runtime — Core still does not depend on Hono, and modules
still cannot reach any of this. Public email/password registration is the intended eventual
product policy — every account receives identical lowest-privilege baseline status and signup
order never grants elevation — but is now **disabled by default, and cannot be enabled in
production at all** until durable abuse controls exist (Phase 5D pass 1, below). See
[API](docs/development/api.md) and
[ADR 0011](docs/architecture/decisions/0011-identity-http-transport-and-public-enrollment.md).
**No email verification, password recovery, or Dashboard exists yet** — that, along with
production approval-provider composition, jobs, physical storage provisioning, surfaces, and
feature modules, remains later vertical slices. Public registration is not yet ready for a real
public launch.

Phase 4C adds Core's authorization foundation on top of identity: a schema, evaluator, and store
for platform owners, explicit grants, and relationship-derived grants; a smallest-possible
immutable permission registry; an explicit, single-use, concurrency-safe platform-owner bootstrap
command (`pnpm authorization:bootstrap-owner`, never HTTP-exposed, never inferred from signup
order); and, in `apps/api`, reusable Hono authorization enforcement plus a narrowly scoped
`/api/v1/grants` HTTP API for managing *explicit* grants only, requiring an exact trusted `Origin`
on every mutation. Roles/groups/teams/tenants, an owner-management HTTP endpoint, and service
accounts/API tokens remain later work. See [Authorization](docs/development/authorization.md) and
[ADR 0013](docs/architecture/decisions/0013-core-authorization-and-owner-bootstrap.md).

Phase 5A wires module-declared permissions into that same authorization system: a version-3 module
manifest declares permissions as complete `{id, baseline, description}` declarations (never a bare
string), and `apps/api` discovers every installed module and composes one immutable platform
permission registry — Core's own declarations plus every module's — before constructing its
database pool, Better Auth instance, or HTTP server. A module's declared permission is then
enforceable and grantable through the exact same `requirePermission` middleware and
`/api/v1/grants` HTTP API Core's own permissions already use, with `core.*` reserved and never
claimable by a module. `pnpm doctor` and `pnpm modules:validate` both validate permission
composition. Installing, removing, or editing a module currently requires an API restart; removing
one makes its permission unavailable to new checks and new grants without deleting or revoking any
historical grant or audit row. See
[Authorization](docs/development/authorization.md#module-permission-composition),
[Module development](docs/module-development/README.md), and
[ADR 0014](docs/architecture/decisions/0014-module-permission-declarations-and-platform-registry.md).

Phase 5B mounts a module's own HTTP routes in production. A module registers framework-neutral
Fetch (`Request`/`Response`) route handlers during its existing `register` hook; Core collects them
into an immutable snapshot alongside its capabilities, and `apps/api` discovers modules exactly
once, starts the module runtime from that same discovered inventory, and mounts its published
routes under `/api/v1/modules/<module-id>` — after every module has registered and started
successfully, so no request can reach a module before startup completes. Every route is enforced
through the identical `requirePermission` middleware and composed permission registry Core's own
routes use (a module can never supply its own baseline), state-changing methods require a trusted
`Origin`, and a handler failure or non-`Response` return becomes a fixed, sanitized `500` — never a
raw error, stack, path, or permission id. Relationship-derived grant creation remains later work.
See [API](docs/development/api.md#module-http-routes),
[Module development](docs/module-development/README.md#http-routes), and
[ADR 0014](docs/architecture/decisions/0014-module-permission-declarations-and-platform-registry.md#deferred).

Phase 5C gives a module's own lifecycle hooks and HTTP handlers typed access to their own
PostgreSQL tables. `context.services.database` — a restricted, typed `ModuleDatabase` view over
Drizzle's `select`/`selectDistinct`/`selectDistinctOn`/`insert`/`update`/`delete`/`execute`/
`transaction`, never a raw `pg` client, pool, or connection string — is available to `start`,
`stop`, and every authorized route handler, and reuses the one PostgreSQL pool `apps/api` already
owns; registration remains declarative and database-free. Modules continue to own and import their
own Drizzle schemas and generated migrations, applied explicitly and never automatically at
startup. See [API](docs/development/api.md#module-database-access),
[Module development](docs/module-development/README.md#database-access), and
[ADR 0016](docs/architecture/decisions/0016-module-database-access.md).

Phase 5D pass 1 of 5 hardens the public request perimeter against an independent security audit
of the Phase 5C checkpoint, without adding a Surface, a product module, or any new capability.
Better Auth's authentication rate limiter now resolves client identity from a server-owned
client-address boundary (`core/src/identity/client-address.ts`, wired in at the Node/API transport
boundary) — direct mode trusts only the real socket peer by default, and an explicit trusted-proxy
mode is required before any forwarded header is ever consulted, closing a rotating-header
rate-limit bypass. Public sign-up is now **disabled by default, and a production configuration that
tries to enable it fails closed** (`PUBLIC_SIGNUP_UNSUPPORTED_IN_PRODUCTION`, reported by `pnpm
doctor` as a blocking failure) — the durable abuse-control prerequisites do not exist yet, so only
development/test composition may enable it. Every public body-consuming route — Better Auth,
Core's grant-mutation endpoint, and every module route (via a new, required `maxBodyBytes` field on
the executable route contract) — now has an explicit, platform-enforced byte ceiling with one
sanitized `413` contract. The Node HTTP server now has finite header/request timeouts, whose real
transport-level failures are observed and logged in sanitized form. See
[API](docs/development/api.md), [Module development](docs/module-development/README.md#http-routes),
and [ADR 0017](docs/architecture/decisions/0017-public-request-perimeter-hardening.md). **This pass
does not add distributed rate limiting, durable public-signup abuse control, or any deployment/TLS
guarantee, and it does not complete Phase 5D** — passes 2–5 (identity/database transport hardening,
authorization integrity, module/runtime/migration correctness, and deployment/supply-chain closure
plus a final independent re-audit) remain outstanding before Phase 6 (Surface work) may begin.

Phase 5D pass 2 of 5 corrects identity session resolution and enforces a database transport policy.
A request carrying no cookies, or only unrelated cookies, now performs **no** identity database
work at all; only a request presenting the configured session cookie that Better Auth resolved to
`null` is disambiguated, by a real read of the session relation and the exact columns the adapter
depends on (under `where false`, so no row is ever read) rather than the previous `select 1`. A
missing table, dropped column, revoked privilege, unreachable database, or query timeout therefore
produces a sanitized `503`, never a silent anonymous downgrade. The identity base URL and every
trusted origin must now be exactly one canonical origin, and production rejects the full
loopback/unspecified address space rather than three literal spellings. **Production PostgreSQL
connections now require TLS with certificate *and* hostname verification** — from the API, both
migration commands, the bootstrap CLI, and `pnpm doctor` alike — with no encryption-only mode, no
`rejectUnauthorized: false` escape hatch, no plaintext exception (not even for a loopback
database), and an explicit refusal of a `DATABASE_URL` that tries to carry its own TLS parameters,
which the pinned driver would otherwise let silently override the policy. See
[Identity](docs/development/identity.md), [API](docs/development/api.md#database-transport-tls), and
[ADR 0018](docs/architecture/decisions/0018-identity-session-resolution-and-database-transport.md).
**This pass adds no secret store, no certificate rotation, no client-certificate authentication, and
no distributed rate limiting; TLS protects the connection, not the exposure, so the network boundary
remains the deployment's own responsibility. Phase 5D is still not complete** — passes 3–5
(authorization integrity, module/runtime/migration correctness, and deployment/supply-chain closure
plus a final independent re-audit) remain outstanding.

Phase 5D pass 3 of 5 preserves authorization security history and makes explicit-grant management
unambiguous and bounded. Authorization **audit history now survives user deletion**: the audit
subject is a retained identifier snapshot with no cascading foreign key, so deleting a user still
removes their live grants and platform-owner row but no longer destroys the record of what they had
been granted and by whom. Platform-owner bootstrap's single use moved to a dedicated singleton with
no user foreign key — previously deleting the bootstrapped owner's user row silently reopened the
one operation that establishes a platform's first administrator; the operational consequence is that
**deleting the last owner does not reactivate bootstrap**, and existing installations are backfilled
as consumed by the new migration. Two equivalent grants can no longer both be effective: creation
conflicts with a sanitized `409`, serialized under real PostgreSQL concurrency, and one revocation
now clears every unrevoked equivalent with a per-row audit entry, so revoking a grant can no longer
report success while a duplicate keeps authorizing the user. Grant ids must be canonical UUIDs and
expirations one exact future-only format, both decided before any database call; the generic HTTP
surface creates unscoped grants only; and listing is bounded keyset pagination with an opaque,
unsigned position cursor. One forward Core migration (`0002_authorization_integrity`,
`{"mode":"none"}`) must be applied before the new code starts. See
[Authorization](docs/development/authorization.md) and
[ADR 0019](docs/architecture/decisions/0019-durable-authorization-history-and-grant-management.md).
**This pass adds no roles, teams, tenants, service accounts, scope resolver, user-deletion endpoint,
or owner-recovery workflow; audit append-only behavior remains an application convention, not a
database or cryptographic guarantee. Phase 5D is still not complete** — passes 4 (module/runtime/
migration correctness) and 5 (deployment/supply chain plus a final independent re-audit) remain
outstanding, and Phase 6 remains blocked.

## Quick start

Prerequisites: Node.js 24 LTS, pnpm 11.12, and Docker with Compose.

```bash
pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
cp .env.example .env   # keep its NODE_ENV=development: see below
pnpm infrastructure:up
pnpm modules:validate
pnpm migrations:validate
pnpm identity:schema:validate
pnpm doctor
pnpm migrations:plan
pnpm test:migrations:integration
pnpm verify
```

`pnpm doctor` builds the workspace first, then reports the supported Node.js runtime, installed
modules and dependency order, schema and migration inventories, the effective PostgreSQL transport
(TLS) policy, optional read-only PostgreSQL planning, and the current object-storage integration
state. `.env.example` sets `NODE_ENV=development` deliberately: anything else, including an unset
value, is validated as production, and production requires certificate-verified PostgreSQL TLS and
rejects loopback/`http` identity origins — so the plaintext loopback database this repository's own
development infrastructure provides is only usable with it set.

Doctor never applies migrations, creates a history table, starts module servers, or performs
storage operations. Schema discovery does import
compiled schema-definition entrypoints; those entrypoints are contractually side-effect-free.

With no installed modules and no `DATABASE_URL`, the current repository produces a report shaped
like this:

```text
Ekklesia Doctor

Platform
  ✓ Runtime version supported
    Active Node.js satisfies the declared supported range.

Modules
  ✓ Module discovery complete
    0 modules installed
  ✓ Dependency graph valid
    Dependency order is empty.
  ✓ Permission registry composed
    1 permission registered

Data definitions
  ✓ Schemas validated
    0 modules · 0 tables
  ✓ Migrations validated
    2 migrations · checksums valid
    core:0000_identity_core_tables · f8f2086ef06f
    core:0001_authorization_core_tables · 830e1fbc26d0

PostgreSQL
  ✓ Database TLS verified
    TLS required with certificate and hostname verification.
  ○ Connection check skipped
    DATABASE_URL is not configured.
  ○ Migration plan skipped
    A validated migration inventory and configured PostgreSQL connection are required.

Identity
  ○ Identity configuration skipped
    Core identity schema defines 4 tables (ekklesia_core_account, ekklesia_core_session, ekklesia_core_user, ekklesia_core_verification).
    Identity runtime configuration (signing key, base URL, trusted origins) is not set.

Object storage
  ○ Check unavailable
    Core storage integration has not been implemented yet.

Result: READY WITH WARNINGS
```

Checks have stable pass, warning, failure, or skipped states. Warnings and skipped optional checks
produce `READY WITH WARNINGS` and exit zero; any failure produces `NOT READY` and exit one. The
dashboard is human-readable local guidance, not a replacement for automated CI evidence.

`pnpm migrations:plan` uses `DATABASE_URL` from the uncommitted `.env` and is read-only.
`pnpm migrations:apply` uses the same validated inventory but mutates PostgreSQL under Core's
advisory lock and one transaction. Review the plan before applying. Destructive migrations are
blocked by default and require an exact externally supplied approval; there is no force flag.

The runner has both deterministic unit coverage through a narrow database port and a separate live
PostgreSQL integration suite. The live command creates and destroys disposable Docker
infrastructure; it remains separate from the Docker-free `pnpm verify` gate.

`pnpm identity:schema:validate` regenerates Better Auth's canonical schema with the pinned local
CLI into a temporary location and structurally compares it against the checked-in
`core/src/identity/schema.ts`, then removes the temporary output. It requires no `DATABASE_URL`
and is part of `pnpm verify`. See [Identity](docs/development/identity.md) for the full upgrade
workflow.

`pnpm api:start` builds the workspace, then starts the identity HTTP transport
(`GET /api/v1/principal`, Better Auth mounted at `/api/auth/*`) against an already-migrated
`DATABASE_URL` — it never applies migrations itself. See [API](docs/development/api.md) for
required configuration, routes, and a full request/response transcript.

Run `pnpm infrastructure:smoke` for an isolated end-to-end PostgreSQL and authenticated S3 check.

The development services bind only to loopback:

- PostgreSQL: `127.0.0.1:5432`
- S3-compatible object storage: `127.0.0.1:8333`

The values in `.env.example` are development-only and must never be reused in a deployed
environment.

## Architecture

- [Platform architecture](docs/architecture/platform-architecture.md)
- [Repository boundaries](docs/architecture/repository-boundaries.md)
- [Repository workflow](docs/development/repository-workflow.md)
- [Testing](docs/development/testing.md)
- [Identity](docs/development/identity.md)
- [API](docs/development/api.md)
- [Authorization](docs/development/authorization.md)
- [Module development](docs/module-development/README.md)
- [Architecture decisions](docs/architecture/decisions/README.md)

No open-source license has been selected yet. A license should be added only after the project
owner makes that decision.