Ekklesia/docs/architecture/platform-architecture.md

Platform architecture

Ekklesia is a long-lived platform from which churches can compose many applications and user experiences. It begins as a modular monolith so contracts can stabilize before distribution is introduced.

Trust boundary. Installed modules are trusted compiled code, not sandboxed plugins: a module runs arbitrary JavaScript in the API process and shares its PostgreSQL role. The layering described below is a correctness and ownership boundary, not hostile-code isolation. A module that ships its own UI (ADR 0021) is exactly as trusted as one that does not. See Security model and deployment trust boundaries.

Dependency model

The arrows below mean "depends on." Presentation and composition depend on stable lower-level contracts; infrastructure never learns individual feature names.

Surface Builder configuration -> Surfaces -> public capability contracts
                                      ^
                                      |
                         HTTP/API and client contracts
                                      |
Feature Modules -> Module SDK / platform contracts <- Core implementations

The four ownership layers are:

1. Core orchestrates generic platform infrastructure: startup, identity, permissions, configuration, database connectivity, storage, events, jobs, module discovery, and lifecycle.
2. Modules own domain behavior, data schemas, resources, actions, routes, events, permissions, jobs — and, per ADR 0021, their own UI, authored in React against @ekklesia/module-ui-sdk (ADR 0022). A module is an independently versioned product, not only a backend capability. It does not own the containing application shell or any platform policy.
3. Surfaces own the presentation concerns a module does not: the containing application shell, layout, navigation, accessibility, interaction, branding, and client state — including the shell that hosts a module's own UI.
4. Surface Builder stores validated declarative composition. It selects capabilities and surface-owned renderers but contains neither executable code nor module business logic.

A module owns its own product experience. Calendar data, actions, permissions, and its own management UI live in modules/calendar; the dashboard or public-website shell that hosts it — navigation, theme, layout, and platform chrome — lives in a surface. The module supplies the screen for its feature; the surface supplies the application around it.

Modules are flat peers. video, livestream, announcements, and calendar are independent first-class modules with no parent/child relationship. A Dashboard may group them into folders such as Media or Sunday Production, but those groups are presentation configuration an administrator can reorganize, never module ownership and never a dependency. Genuine module and capability dependencies remain the only way one module may require another.

Stable seams

• Modules use public SDK ports and injected Core services, never undocumented Core internals.
• Modules do not import another module's schema or private code. Integrations use public service contracts, capabilities, events, or APIs.
• Surfaces consume API/client and capability contracts, never feature-module packages.
• Core discovers feature modules generically. It contains no feature-specific imports or conditional branches.
• Deployable apps are thin composition roots and do not become domain-logic owners.
• Generated bootstrap artifacts may connect discovered entry points at the application edge; they do not become manually maintained Core registries.

Security invariants

• Authorization is enforced server-side.
• Secrets are isolated from public configuration and logs.
• Authentication tokens, private form content, prayer requests, and pastoral information are not logged.
• Sensitive actions are designed for auditability without copying sensitive content into audit records.
• Private objects use signed access and namespaced storage paths.
• Every network service starts from least-privilege and local-only development defaults.

Current implementation status

Implemented now: the Phase 1 repository and infrastructure foundation plus public module contracts, static versioned manifests, independent capability versions and dependency ranges, automatic filesystem discovery, compiled server loading, runtime-definition verification, staged capability registration, dependency-ordered startup and reverse shutdown, rollback, and a backend-only module template. Optional compiled schema entrypoints now contribute validated, namespaced module-owned Drizzle tables to a deterministic aggregate without connecting to a database. Optional module-owned Drizzle migration directories now produce an atomic dependency-ordered offline inventory with validated metadata, explicit destructive-change declarations, and exact SHA-256 checksums. Core can now compare that inventory with its fixed PostgreSQL history table, produce a read-only plan, and apply the complete pending batch under a session advisory lock and one transaction. Destructive migrations require an exact externally supplied approval bound to module, identity, and checksum. Hermetic integration coverage now exercises those contracts through the production adapter against the pinned PostgreSQL container, including real DDL rollback and advisory-lock concurrency. The Core-owned Doctor composes those existing services into a deterministic terminal readiness report: static module, schema, and migration validation always run when their prerequisites succeed, while PostgreSQL history planning runs only when configured. Schema inspection evaluates compiled schema definition entrypoints, which the module contract requires to be side-effect-free; Doctor never imports or starts module server entrypoints. It does not apply migrations or modify PostgreSQL, and it honestly skips object storage because no production Core storage service exists yet.

Phase 4A added the Core identity foundation. Core owns a Better Auth-backed identity schema (ekklesia_core_user, ekklesia_core_session, ekklesia_core_account, ekklesia_core_verification) reachable only through Ekklesia-owned contracts and an explicit Core-owned Better Auth construction boundary; modules never import Better Auth or receive a raw database client. That schema ships as a first-class Core-owned migration source that reuses the exact migration format, checksum rule, planner, and transactional runner Phase 3 already established, ordered before module migrations in the same aggregate. See ADR 0010.

Phase 4B adds identity HTTP transport: a minimal Hono-based apps/api composition root mounts Better Auth at /api/auth/* and exposes one Ekklesia-owned route, GET /api/v1/principal, behind Core's own Fetch-compatible identity runtime (@ekklesia/core/identity) — Core still does not depend on Hono. 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 disabled by default as of Phase 5D pass 1, below. See ADR 0011 and the API guide, and the identity development guide for the underlying schema and contracts. It is now possible to publicly register, sign in, resolve a principal, and sign out.

Phase 4C is complete: Core's authorization foundation — a schema, evaluator, and store for platform owners, explicit grants, and relationship-derived grants, plus an immutable permission registry — and an explicit, single-use, auditable platform-owner bootstrap command, plus reusable Hono enforcement and an /api/v1/grants HTTP API in apps/api. See ADR 0013 and the authorization guide.

Phase 5A wired module-declared permissions into that same authorization system — a version-3 manifest, one composed platform permission registry spanning Core's own declarations and every installed module's, enforced through the identical middleware Core's own routes use. Phase 5B let a module mount its own framework-neutral HTTP routes in production, under /api/v1/modules/<module-id>, enforced and response-sanitized exactly like Core's own routes. Phase 5C added typed module database access (context.services.database) for a module's lifecycle hooks and authorized HTTP handlers, over the platform's one existing PostgreSQL pool. See ADR 0014, ADR 0015, ADR 0016, and the repository root README for the complete, current status of every phase.

Phase 5D is complete. Five passes hardened the platform against an independent security audit of the Phase 5C checkpoint, and an independent whole-repository re-audit closed the phase:

1. the public request perimeter — a server-owned client-address resolution boundary for the authentication rate limiter, public sign-up disabled by default behind an explicit typed opt-in, an enforced request-body ceiling on every public route (including a module route's own declared contract), and finite Node header/request timeouts;
2. identity session resolution, and a mandatory certificate- and hostname-verified PostgreSQL transport with no plaintext or rejectUnauthorized: false exception;
3. durable authorization history that survives user deletion, a one-time owner bootstrap that deleting a user cannot reopen, and bounded, unambiguous explicit-grant management;
4. module route-overlap rejection at registration, finite startup rollback and shutdown deadlines, and hardened migration command timeouts and SQL execution;
5. deployment and supply-chain closure plus the final re-audit.

See ADR 0017, ADR 0018, ADR 0019, and ADR 0020.

These guarantees hold under a trusted-contributor, not-yet-deployed threat model. The remaining limitations are operational rather than architectural: CI is a trusted-code-only boundary whose runner topology and job-token authority are unverified, and Ekklesia is not deployed, so the origin, proxy, and throttling properties a public launch requires are unproven. Neither set of requirements blocks Phase 6. Read Security model and deployment trust boundaries for what each boundary does and does not protect against, and the repository root README for the current status of every phase.

Phase 6A established the module product contract. ADR 0021 replaces the backend-only module model: a module is an independently versioned product that may own its own UI, hostable inside Ekklesia and — later, from the same implementation — as a standalone application. Core keeps the host shell and every platform policy, the module graph stays flat, and Dashboard grouping stays presentation configuration.

What that pass implemented is the static contract only: manifestVersion: 4 adds one optional entrypoints.ui field, validated during discovery exactly like the server and schema entrypoints — package-relative, inside the package, compiled ESM. Discovery remains inert; nothing imports, mounts, or renders that entrypoint.

Phase 6B pass 1 defines the module UI authoring model and host contract. ADR 0022 selects React and TypeScript as the supported way to author module UI, and defines what a compiled entrypoints.ui artifact exports and what a host provides it. React is the authoring model but deliberately not the contract: an artifact default-exports defineModuleUi({ id, version, mount }), and mount(container, context) takes a DOM element and returns an unmount function, so a module's framework and a host's stay independent.

The contract lives in @ekklesia/module-ui-sdk, a browser-safe shared package with no runtime dependencies, consumed by module authors and hosts alike. Its host context is four members — moduleId, api, principal, permissions. Module UI reaches its own backend through api.request(path) with a path relative to the module's own API root, never by constructing Ekklesia's /api/v1/modules/<module-id> prefix, which is what keeps a standalone host possible. Client-side permission hints are presentation only; server-side enforcement remains the sole authority. Module UI is trusted code in the host's browser realm — there is no sandbox, matching the backend trust model rather than overstating it.

Core is untouched by this: discovery still validates the entrypoints.ui path and never evaluates it, and hosts perform their own dynamic import.

Phase 6B pass 2 makes that contract buildable. ADR 0023 selects esbuild, compiles a module's src/ui/index.tsx into the browser ESM artifact its manifest declares, and puts every bundler option in one tooling package so module authors write no build configuration. React is bundled rather than externalized, keeping mount() the ABI and a module artifact hostable by any host; styling is inline style objects only, and a stylesheet import fails the build rather than emitting an asset nothing declares. Building remains an authoring step — Core never builds, and discovery still only validates the artifact a module shipped. The Dashboard shell, a UI runtime, a design system, a stylesheet loading contract, the standalone host, and every feature module remain future work.

Phase 6B pass 3 makes the browser boundary real and adds the generic host loader. ADR 0024 removes the UI SDK's last dependency — one type-only import of the contracts barrel that pulled Drizzle's types, and Node's globals, into browser programs — so the SDK now depends on nothing and defines its own plain ModuleUiPrincipal. @ekklesia/module-ui-host is the loader both Ekklesia and a future standalone host will use: dynamic import from a browser URL, identity validated against the manifest before mounting, a host-owned container the loader never mutates, and an idempotent unmount. Modules may not depend on it.

Phase 6C pass 1 publishes a validated module UI artifact at a browser URL. ADR 0025 closes the gap the previous pass named: Core resolves entrypoints.ui to a server filesystem path, and a browser needs a URL.

Core owns the policy and apps/api owns the transport. createModuleUiPublicationRegistry (core/src/modules/ui-publication.ts) answers "may this be published, and which exact file is it?" from the discovered, started module inventory — publishable means the module survived discovery and declares entrypoints.ui, no new lifecycle state and no installer. apps/api serves GET /api/v1/module-ui/<module-id>/<version>, where both segments are lookup keys, not path components: an exact match yields the canonical artifact path discovery already validated, and no request value is ever composed into a filesystem path. There is no wildcard segment, so traversal, sibling chunks, package-root files, and source maps are unreachable by construction — an installed module directory never becomes a static file root. The prefix is a sibling of /api/v1/modules/ rather than a child because ui is a legal module route segment and a module could otherwise collide with the platform.

The route requires no authentication: the bundle confers no authority, every module API stays behind requirePermission, and a cookie-gated route would break cross-origin import(), which sends none. The disclosure that buys — a caller who knows a module id and its exact version can download that bundle — is stated rather than papered over, and the three failure modes are made indistinguishable so the route is not an enumeration oracle. Caching is no-cache with a strong ETag, not immutable, because without an installer a version can be rebuilt with different bytes. The server reads and writes bytes; it never imports, evaluates, or transforms the artifact.

Phase 6C pass 2 builds the browser host that consumes it. ADR 0026 adds surfaces/shell (@ekklesia/shell), the repository's first surface: a small React application, built to static files by its own esbuild script, that discovers installed module UIs and mounts them.

The missing piece was discovery. GET /api/v1/module-ui — the collection root of the same prefix the artifact route already owns — returns, per publishable module, its id and version, the server-produced artifact URL, the server-produced root of the module's own API, and the subset of that module's declared permissions the caller actually holds. Nothing else: no filesystem paths, and no display or navigation metadata, since ADR 0021 keeps Dashboard grouping an administrator's presentation configuration. The module set is the publication registry, never a rescan, so the inventory and the artifact route cannot disagree. It requires core.modules.ui.read (baseline authenticated) because it is precisely the enumeration ADR 0025 withheld from the anonymous artifact route.

Both URLs being server-produced is the load-bearing part. moduleUiArtifactUrl and the newly exported moduleApiBaseUrl are each the single construction of their URL shape, so the browser is a consumer of both — it never rebuilds /api/v1/modules/<id>, the prefix ADR 0022 forbids a module UI from spelling, and neither prefix is pinned by having a second author.

The shell builds a ModuleUiHostContext entirely from server-derived data, resolves a module's relative API calls onto its own API root (refusing anything that escapes it), and hands the artifact URL to @ekklesia/module-ui-host. It statically imports no module: one frame per selection defeats the stale-load race, the host owns the container and every loading and error state, and the bundle is checked to contain exactly one dynamic import with no module identity baked in. Permission hints come from Core's own evaluator and stay presentation-only — server authorization is proven unchanged by a test in which a UI holding no grant calls its API anyway and is refused.

Phase 6D pass 1 adds the Dashboard navigation model, and fixes the rule it could have broken. ADR 0027 establishes that a Dashboard group is presentation configuration and never module structure. A group is a label on a rendering bucket: no manifest, version, artifact, API, permission, or lifecycle, and nothing depends on it. Placing two modules in one folder creates no relationship between them; Livestream depends on Video because it calls Video's functionality orders startup, while Livestream is shown under Media orders nothing. Modules stay flat, with no parent, child, owner, or group-derived dependency.

No manifest change was needed: manifest.name has been required since version 1 and already is the module's product identity, so the shell renders it instead of the module id. suggestedGroup was deferred rather than shipped — it would force a hard manifest-version cutover for a hint, and its only correct semantics needs initialization logic that risks a suggestion overwriting an administrator's decision.

Core owns the persistence: two ekklesia_core_dashboard_* tables (migration 0003) holding groups and placements, platform-global because no organization model exists yet. group_id is on delete set null, so deleting a group ungroups its modules and a dangling reference is impossible; module_id carries no foreign key, because modules are packages rather than rows, so a placement for an uninstalled module is retained and restores its position on reinstall. resolveDashboardNavigation is a pure function of configuration plus the mountable set: an unplaced module is ungrouped and visible with no initialization write, an absent module renders nothing, empty groups are kept, and ordering is total with the identifier as final tie-break.

GET /api/v1/dashboard/navigation returns the resolved view, layered on top of the host-neutral module UI inventory rather than merged into it — it embeds each generic descriptor untouched, so a standalone host consuming the inventory never inherits Dashboard semantics. Reading requires the same permission the inventory does; organizing requires the new platform permission core.dashboard.navigation.manage through a narrow, structured, idempotent mutation contract. The shell renders that arrangement and computes none of it.

Still not the finished Dashboard. No editor or drag and drop, no nested folders, no icons, no Dashboard Home or widgets, no design system, and no client routing. A production CSP and a deployment for the built shell, sign-in UI, general asset publication, and the standalone host remain future work. Restart-based discovery, explicit operator-invoked migrations, and the trusted compiled-module model are all unchanged.

Target architecture not yet implemented includes production approval-provider composition, physical storage-bucket provisioning, jobs/workflow automation, richer public resource and action contracts, a Dashboard, a Builder, and reference feature modules; none of these are scheduled by this document.

Phase 7A pass 1 adds the platform's operational module lifecycle (ADR 0028). Core now has two clearly separated axes: configuration (enabled/disabled, persistent, administrator-owned, stored in one Core table) and runtime (running/disabled/blocked, observed per boot). resolveModuleEligibility is a pure function of the discovered inventory plus that configuration: a module with no stored record is enabled by default, an explicit decision always wins, a disabled module transitively blocks every module that requires it (module and capability edges alike, with a structured reason naming the provider), and an optional dependency never blocks anything. startApi starts only the eligible set and builds the UI publication registry from that same list, so routes, artifacts, browser inventory, and Dashboard navigation all follow one authoritative set rather than a filter downstream.

Startup remains all-or-nothing across the eligible set — ADR 0015 and ADR 0020's rollback guarantee is unchanged, and there is deliberately no failed runtime state, because no live process could report one. Enablement is what makes a broken module recoverable, with pnpm modules:disable as the out-of-band path. Changes take effect at the next start, and the read model reports configuration, runtime, and restartRequired separately rather than claiming a module stopped when it has not. Migration discovery still spans the deployed inventory regardless of enablement, and permission composition still spans the whole discovered set. running means a module's start hook completed and nothing more; there is no runtime health-probe contract. Modules remain trusted compiled code — disabling one is an operational control, never a sandbox. No installer exists.

Phase 7A pass 2 adds the module configuration and secrets contract (ADR 0029). A module declares what it needs configured in its manifest — manifestVersion: 5, a hard cutover — using six types (string, integer, boolean, enum, url, secret) with bounded constraints and no nesting. Static declaration is what lets the platform validate configuration before deciding whether a module may start, so an unconfigured module is reported blocked · configuration_missing rather than taking startup down from inside its own start hook; discovery, pnpm modules:validate, and Doctor all read it while remaining manifest-only.

Ordinary values are persisted in one Core table, one row per (module_id, key), stored as unvalidated text until checked against the declaring module's current manifest. Secret values are never persisted: Ekklesia has no encryption at rest, so a secret key is supplied by the deployment and mapped into the module's snapshot by the host, under a name the module never sees. A module receives a frozen context.config on its registration, runtime, and HTTP handler contexts — the same object identity across all of them — with no environment access, no database reference, and no way to reach another module's values, which is what keeps the same module implementation runnable under a future standalone host.

Configuration decides eligibility through ADR 0028's existing resolver rather than a parallel concept: three new blocked reasons (configuration_missing, configuration_invalid, secret_missing) name the offending key, and a configuration-blocked module blocks its required dependents exactly like a disabled one. Changes take effect at the next restart and the API reports restartRequired; nothing is hot-reloaded. Migration discovery remains independent of configuration validity, exactly as it is independent of enabled state. Endpoints and credentials for shared infrastructure stay platform concerns — a module declares which bucket it needs, not an S3 endpoint — leaving room for the object storage service Core still does not have. There is no settings UI.