Ekklesia

Ekklesia is an open, modular church technology platform. Each module is an independently versioned product that owns its domain behavior, data, and its own UI, composed into 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 (security hardening against an independent security audit) is complete: all five passes have landed and the final independent whole-repository re-audit has closed, under the current trusted-contributor, not-yet-deployed threat model — and Phase 6 is unblocked and underway. The operational requirements that remain are prerequisites for two specific future activities — executing untrusted CI contributions, and a public production launch — and neither gates Phase 6; see the pass 5 closure below and Security model and deployment trust boundaries. 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 and ADR 0010.

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 and ADR 0011. 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 and ADR 0013.

Phase 5A wires module-declared permissions into that same authorization system: the module manifest (version 3 at the time, version 4 today) 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, Module development, and ADR 0014.

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, Module development, and ADR 0014.

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, Module development, and ADR 0016.

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, Module development, and ADR 0017. This pass does not add distributed rate limiting, durable public-signup abuse control, or any deployment/TLS guarantee, and it did not by itself complete Phase 5D — at the close of this pass, passes 2–5 (identity/database transport hardening, authorization integrity, module/runtime/migration correctness, and deployment/supply-chain closure plus a final independent re-audit) were still outstanding, and Phase 6 (Surface work) was blocked until they landed.

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, API, and ADR 0018. 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. This pass did not by itself complete Phase 5D — at its close, passes 3–5 (authorization integrity, module/runtime/migration correctness, and deployment/supply-chain closure plus a final independent re-audit) were still 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 and ADR 0019. 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. This pass did not by itself complete Phase 5D — at its close, passes 4 (module/runtime/migration correctness) and 5 (deployment/supply chain plus a final independent re-audit) were still outstanding, and Phase 6 was blocked until they landed.

Phase 5D pass 4 of 5 hardens the module runtime and the migration commands. Two routes of one module that could both match the same request path are now rejected at registration (MODULE_ROUTE_OVERLAP) instead of being resolved by declaration order — with different permissions on /events/:id and /events/new, registration order alone previously decided which permission guarded /events/new. Decoded route parameters are documented as untrusted, module-owned input that handlers must validate against their own domain grammar; no generic validator or route field was added. A module whose start hook fails is now rolled back through its own stop hook first, so partially acquired resources are released, and every stop/rollback hook runs under a fixed 10-second deadline while HTTP shutdown drains for at most 30 seconds before force-closing connections through Node's supported public APIs — shutdown is finite at every stage, reports a forced drain or a hook failure as an unsuccessful shutdown, and always still reaches pool closure. migrations:plan/migrations:apply now connect with fixed 10-second connection, query, and statement_timeout defaults that a DATABASE_URL cannot weaken (the pinned driver lets a connection string override explicit options — verified), and each migration's SQL is sent to PostgreSQL intact, as one parsed batch inside the existing transaction rather than split on the literal --> statement-breakpoint bytes, which corrupted any migration containing those bytes in a string literal, dollar-quoted body, quoted identifier, or comment. See Module development, API, and ADR 0020. Deadlines bound how long the platform waits; they do not cancel or sandbox trusted in-process module code, and closing a socket does not prove a handler promise ended. No custom SQL parser exists. Modules remain trusted compiled backend code with no process, role, schema, or tenant isolation. This pass did not by itself complete Phase 5D — at its close, pass 5 (deployment/supply chain plus an independent whole-repository re-audit) was still outstanding, and Phase 6 was blocked until it landed.

Phase 5D pass 5 of 5 closes the phase with an independent whole-repository re-audit and the repository-local half of deployment and supply-chain hardening. The re-audit swept every layer — Core, contracts, apps/api, scripts, the CI workflow, and documentation — and its repository-local findings are resolved here: every dependency advisory is remediated (both pnpm audit and pnpm audit --prod report no known vulnerabilities), every CI action reference is pinned to a full immutable commit SHA, installs run --frozen-lockfile, no workflow references a repository or instance secret, every checkout step sets persist-credentials: false, a checksum-verified secret scan found no committed credential in the history, and one canonical security document now states the trusted-module model, the undeployed state, and the launch checklist in a single place. CI is accepted as a trusted-code-only boundary: the self-hosted Gitea runner executes only code controlled and reviewed by trusted repository collaborators, and unknown or untrusted pull requests must not execute on it automatically. What remains is operational and cannot be proven from this repository — upgrading Gitea past 1.24.2 (which ignores the workflow's permissions, concurrency, and timeout-minutes declarations), clamping job-token authority server-side, enforcing timeout and teardown in a trusted provisioner/reaper, and proving disposable runner isolation. Those are prerequisites for executing untrusted contributions, alongside the deployment checklist that gates a public launch; moving future public contribution workflows to a service with isolated hosted runners is an acceptable alternative. Neither set of requirements blocks Phase 6 — Surface development proceeds under the current trusted-contributor, not-yet-deployed model. Runner topology and job-token authority remain unverified and are not described as isolated. See Security model and deployment trust boundaries.

Phase 6A established the module product contract. Ekklesia's modules are no longer backend-only capability packages: a module is an independently versioned product that owns its domain behavior, data, permissions, routes, migrations, and — new in this pass — its own UI. Core keeps the containing application shell and every platform policy (authentication, authorization enforcement, platform context, top-level routing, navigation, global theme, error boundaries, trusted-origin/CORS). Modules stay flat peers: video, livestream, and announcements are independent first-class modules with no parent/child relationship, and a Dashboard folder such as Media is presentation configuration an administrator can reorganize, never module architecture and never a dependency. The long-term goal is one module implementation hosted by Ekklesia and, later, by a standalone application — never two codebases for one domain. See ADR 0021.

What that pass shipped is the static contract only. manifestVersion: 4 adds one optional field, entrypoints.ui, a package-relative path to a compiled ESM artifact validated during discovery exactly like server and schema — inside the package, real file, no source TypeScript. Discovery stays inert: nothing imports, mounts, or renders that entrypoint, exactly like the long-declared entrypoints.jobs. Upgrading a backend-only version 3 manifest is a one-character edit; version 3 is rejected outright rather than reinterpreted, as version 2 was before it. The Dashboard shell, a UI runtime or renderer, navigation registration, Dashboard grouping, a standalone host, a module installer or marketplace, hot-loading, and every feature module do not exist. Restart-based discovery, explicit operator-invoked migrations, and the trusted compiled-module model are unchanged.

Phase 6B pass 1 answers the question Phase 6A deliberately left open: what a module UI actually is, and what a host gives it. Module UI is authored in React and TypeScript, and a module package may now contain .tsx and depend on react/react-dom — every other UI framework stays rejected by pnpm boundaries, and the layer rules are untouched, so module UI still cannot import Core, an app, a surface, or another module. React is the supported authoring model but is deliberately not in the contract: a module's compiled entrypoints.ui artifact default-exports defineModuleUi({ id, version, mount }), and mount(container, context) receives a DOM element and returns an unmount function. A host needs an element and a context, never a matching framework.

The new @ekklesia/module-ui-sdk package (no runtime dependencies; its one dependency on @ekklesia/contracts is type-only) carries that contract for module authors and hosts alike. The host context is deliberately four members — moduleId, api, principal, permissions — and nothing else. A module UI asks its host for its own API by relative path (api.request("posts")) and never constructs /api/v1/modules/<id>/..., which is Ekklesia's private deployment detail; that one rule is what keeps a future standalone host possible, and the test suite proves it by mounting one fixture artifact under two hosts with different origins and URL shapes. Client-side permission hints are presentation only — server-side requirePermission remains the sole authority — and module UI is trusted code in the host's own browser realm: no iframe, no sandbox, matching the backend trust model rather than pretending to improve on it. See ADR 0022.

Core still never loads browser code: discovery validates the entrypoints.ui path and never evaluates it, and hosts do their own dynamic import.

Phase 6B pass 2 makes that contract buildable end to end. A module author writes React and TypeScript at src/ui/index.tsx and runs its normal pnpm build; esbuild compiles it to the browser ESM artifact the manifest declares. Authors write no bundler configuration — the new @ekklesia/module-ui-build package owns all of it, and because it uses the existing tooling role that modules could already depend on, this pass required no boundary relaxation at all. The output path is read from the manifest rather than a build convention, so the declared and produced artifacts cannot drift.

React is bundled into each artifact rather than shared from the host. That is the decision ADR 0022 implies: mount() is the ABI precisely so React is not part of the host contract, and externalizing it would make every host supply a compatible React — defeating standalone hosting. The accepted cost is duplicate React runtimes and large unminified artifacts (~570 KB for the template); sharing one runtime later is a build optimization that does not change the contract. Styling is React inline style objects only: a stylesheet import fails the build rather than emitting a sidecar .css that no manifest declares and no host loads. Building is an authoring step — Core never builds, and installing a module or starting the API never triggers one.

templates/module is the canonical example and now ships optional UI. Its tests build the artifact from source, validate it with parseModuleUiExport, mount it into a real DOM, assert the rendered output, and unmount it — so a UI that cannot be produced fails CI, and no generated file is ever committed. See ADR 0023.

Still no host. A module UI can be authored, built, and tested; nothing serves one to a user yet. The Dashboard shell, navigation, a design system, a stylesheet loading contract, and the standalone host do not exist.

Security model. Installed modules are trusted compiled backend code that runs arbitrary JavaScript in the API process and shares its PostgreSQL role — table prefixes, manifests, permission declarations, typed facades, and frozen contexts are correctness boundaries, not a sandbox. Ekklesia is also not currently deployed: there is no production instance, reverse proxy, public listener, or deployment automation, so the origin/proxy/throttling properties a public launch requires are unproven launch-blockers rather than existing guarantees. Read Security model and deployment trust boundaries before installing a module or exposing the API.

Quick start

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

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:

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
    3 migrations · checksums valid
    core:0000_identity_core_tables · f8f2086ef06f
    core:0001_authorization_core_tables · 830e1fbc26d0
    core:0002_authorization_integrity · 634294731180

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 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 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
• Repository boundaries
• Repository workflow
• Testing
• Identity
• API
• Authorization
• Module development
• Architecture decisions

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