Ekklesia/docs/development/api.md

# API

Phase 4B adds `apps/api`: a minimal Hono-based HTTP transport that mounts Better Auth and exposes
one Ekklesia-owned route to resolve the current principal. It does not add a Dashboard, Website, or
Mobile Surface, and it does not add roles, permissions, or a platform-owner concept — see
[ADR 0011](../architecture/decisions/0011-identity-http-transport-and-public-enrollment.md) for the
full architectural decision and [Identity](identity.md) for the identity foundation this builds on.
A follow-up corrective slice hardened this transport (sanitized Better Auth logging,
production-equivalent origin/CSRF protection under the test runner, bounded identity database
timeouts, idempotent shutdown, and pinned password-length boundaries) without changing any of the
above; see [ADR 0012](../architecture/decisions/0012-identity-origin-csrf-protection-under-test.md).
Phase 4C adds Core's authorization foundation and, on top of this transport, a platform-owner
bootstrap command plus an enforced explicit-grant HTTP API — see [Authorization](authorization.md).

## What this is, and is not

After this slice it is possible to start the API, publicly create an ordinary account, sign in,
resolve a request to an Ekklesia principal, and sign out. It is **not** possible to verify an email
address, recover a forgotten password, use any provider besides email/password, reach a Dashboard,
or hold any role or permission — none of that exists yet. **Public registration is not ready for a
real public launch after this PR**: there is no email delivery service, so an unverified email is
trusted as entered and a forgotten password has no recovery path.

## Starting the API

```bash
pnpm migrations:apply   # the database must already be migrated — the API never does this itself
pnpm api:start
```

`pnpm api:start` follows the repository's build-first convention (`turbo run build`) so it works
from a clean checkout, then runs the compiled `apps/api/dist/server.js`. It reads configuration
from the environment (optionally via an uncommitted `.env`, loaded with
`--env-file-if-exists=.env`) and fails with a concise, sanitized error and a nonzero exit code if
required configuration is missing or invalid — it never applies migrations, creates the identity
tables, or repairs schema, and it fails safely (without mutating the database) if the required
schema is absent.

### Required configuration

No real values are shown here — configure per environment and never commit them:

| Variable | Requirement |
| --- | --- |
| `DATABASE_URL` | An absolute `postgres://` or `postgresql://` URL to an already-migrated database. |
| `EKKLESIA_API_HOST` | Optional. Listen address. Defaults to loopback (`127.0.0.1`). An explicit non-loopback address is permitted for future deployment. |
| `EKKLESIA_API_PORT` | Optional. Listen port, `0`–`65535` (`0` requests an OS-assigned port). Defaults to `3000`. |
| `EKKLESIA_IDENTITY_SECRET` | At least 32 characters, high entropy (for example `openssl rand -base64 32`). Same requirement as Phase 4A. |
| `EKKLESIA_IDENTITY_BASE_URL` | An absolute `http`/`https` URL. `https` is required in production; loopback hosts are rejected in production. |
| `EKKLESIA_IDENTITY_TRUSTED_ORIGINS` | Comma-separated list of absolute origins (no path/query/fragment, no wildcards). Used for both Better Auth's own CSRF/origin checks and the API's CORS policy — there is only one trusted-origin list. |
| `NODE_ENV` | `development` explicitly opts into relaxed (loopback/`http`) origin validation for local development. Anything else, including unset, validates as production. |

## Routes

| Route | Owner | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `POST\|GET /api/auth/*` | Better Auth (mounted directly) | Better Auth's own request/response shapes pass through unmodified — see [Better Auth's email/password docs](https://www.better-auth.com/docs/authentication/email-password) for the exact endpoints (`/sign-up/email`, `/sign-in/email`, `/sign-out`, `/get-session`, ...). |
| `GET /api/v1/principal` | Ekklesia | Returns the minimal `EkklesiaPrincipal` contract as JSON. `Cache-Control: no-store`. |
| `GET\|POST /api/v1/grants*` | Ekklesia | Explicit authorization grant management, gated by `core.authorization.grants.manage`. See [Authorization](authorization.md#explicit-grant-http-api). |

Better Auth's handler is unreachable outside `/api/auth/*`; every other unmatched path returns a
deterministic `404 {"code":"NOT_FOUND"}`.

### `GET /api/v1/principal` response shapes

Anonymous (no session, or an expired/revoked/malformed session):

```json
{ "kind": "anonymous" }
```

Authenticated:

```json
{ "kind": "authenticated", "userId": "2aKp4jPeV1QbXwyz1OH6IcAUfl2n1fc1" }
```

Infrastructure failure (the identity database could not be reached while resolving the principal —
never silently reported as anonymous):

```json
{ "code": "PRINCIPAL_RESOLUTION_FAILED" }
```
returned with HTTP `503`.

This is deliberately not the same thing as Better Auth's own `GET /api/auth/get-session` response,
which returns Better Auth's full `{session, user}` shape (session id, expiry, IP address, user
agent, email, name, image, email-verification status, and more). `/api/v1/principal` is the
Ekklesia-owned contract every other Core/Surface consumer should use; it never contains email,
name, image, session id or expiry, session token, account/provider details, or any role,
permission, membership, or volunteer data.

## Public registration policy

Anyone may create an account (`emailAndPassword.enabled: true`, `disableSignUp: false`). A
registered account is an **authentication identity** — proof that someone can present this email
and password — not a church-membership record; it does not imply attendance or involvement, and
nothing about it is recorded beyond Better Auth's own required `user`/`account` rows. Every
account, first or five-hundredth, receives identical baseline authenticated status: no Dashboard
access, no module-management access, no staff/volunteer-management access, and no
media/event/form/roster/people-management permission — Core has no authorization schema in this
slice to grant any of that, and no code path in this repository inspects how many accounts already
exist or treats an empty database as special. Baseline authenticated status is what will eventually
let a signed-in person use ownership-scoped personal features (watch history, continue watching,
saved content, preferences) — none of those features are implemented in this PR.

Explicit **platform-owner bootstrap** is now available as a local operator command — see
[Authorization](authorization.md#platform-owner-bootstrap) — and grants an *existing* identity
platform-owner authority; signup order is never part of that decision. Future
**relationship-derived access** (for example, a person added to a volunteer roster automatically
gaining narrow, reversible read access to that roster) belongs to a later roster slice, not this
one.

`emailAndPassword.autoSignIn` is set to `false`. Signing up creates the account but does **not**
automatically create a session — no `Set-Cookie` is sent, and the sign-up response's `token` field
is `null`. The caller must call `/api/auth/sign-in/email` explicitly afterward. This is deliberate:
per the pinned Better Auth release, `autoSignIn: false` activates its built-in email-enumeration
protection, so a duplicate sign-up returns the same `200` shape (with a fresh, unrelated random id)
whether or not the email was already registered, rather than revealing which. No custom
cryptography replaces Better Auth's own password hashing. Password length is pinned explicitly to
8–128 characters (`minPasswordLength`/`maxPasswordLength` in `core/src/identity/runtime.ts`) rather
than left on Better Auth's fallback default — the pinned release's default happens to be the same
8–128 range, but an implicit default can change silently on a future Better Auth upgrade, while an
explicit value cannot. `apps/api/tests/api-http.integration.ts` proves the exact boundary against a
real server: 7 characters rejected, 8 accepted, 128 accepted, 129 rejected.

## Origin, CORS, and cookies

The API reuses the same `EKKLESIA_IDENTITY_TRUSTED_ORIGINS` list for both CORS and Better Auth's
own origin/CSRF checks — there is no second, competing configuration. CORS reflects a request's
`Origin` header back only when it exactly matches a configured trusted origin (never a wildcard,
since `Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *` cannot be combined with `Access-Control-Allow-Credentials:
true`); a disallowed origin never receives the header at all, though the request itself may still
be processed — CORS is a browser-enforced, response-header mechanism, not a server-side gate. A
request with no `Origin` header at all (native or server-to-server clients) is unaffected by CORS.
Note this is narrower than it sounds for `/api/auth/sign-in/email` and `/api/auth/sign-up/email`
specifically: any client built on the Fetch API — every browser, and also Node's own `fetch()` —
automatically sends a `Sec-Fetch-Mode: cors` header on every request, and Better Auth's first-login
CSRF protection treats that as "this came from a Fetch client" and requires a trusted `Origin` (or
`Referer`) on those two routes regardless of whether a cookie is present. A genuinely non-Fetch
caller (curl, or most backend HTTP client libraries, which send none of the `Sec-Fetch-*` headers)
is unaffected and needs no `Origin` header at all — see the dedicated raw-socket test in
`apps/api/tests/api-http.integration.ts` for the exact distinction proven against a real server.

Better Auth's own CSRF/origin protections are explicitly kept on:
`core/src/identity/runtime.ts` sets `advanced: { disableCSRFCheck: false, disableOriginCheck:
false }`. This is deliberately explicit rather than left unset — the pinned release's own default
is environment-sensitive (`skipOriginCheck` falls back to `true`, silently disabling both origin
and CSRF checking, whenever `isTest()` is true, which Vitest's default `NODE_ENV=test` triggers),
so an unset config would mean origin/CSRF protection is silently off under the test runner and on
in production. Setting both flags explicitly removes that environment-sensitive branch entirely,
so `pnpm test:migrations:integration` now automatically proves the exact production behavior: any
non-`GET`/`HEAD`/`OPTIONS` request carrying a session cookie must also carry a trusted `Origin` (or
`Referer`), or Better Auth rejects it with `403` (and the presented session remains valid
afterward); a no-cookie first authentication attempt from an untrusted origin is rejected the same
way; a trusted origin is accepted in both cases; and a denied origin never receives a permissive
CORS header. See [ADR 0012](../architecture/decisions/0012-identity-origin-csrf-protection-under-test.md)
for the root-cause investigation and the full account of what changed.

Cookies keep Better Auth's defaults: `HttpOnly` always, `SameSite=Lax` always, `Secure` when the
configured base URL is `https://`. Cross-subdomain cookies are not enabled and no cookie `Domain`
attribute is set, so every cookie is host-only. Trusted proxy headers are not configured in this
slice — a deployment behind a reverse proxy is future work.

## Logging

Two independent, complementary layers, both configured explicitly in `core/src/identity/runtime.ts`
rather than left on any environment-sensitive default:

1. **`logger`.** Better Auth's own default (`level: "warn"`, plain `console.*` output) is replaced.
   The pinned release's log call sites are not a stable, fully-audited contract — several pass a
   raw internal exception, and at least one (the origin-check middleware) interpolates a
   user-controlled `Origin` header directly into the message text. Rather than sanitize each call
   site's message and arguments individually, Core's logger configuration drops the message and
   every argument entirely and emits only a fixed, generic string
   (`"[identity] Better Auth reported an error."`) via `console.error`, and only for error-level
   events — nothing is ever emitted for warn/info/debug.
2. **`onAPIError: { throw: true }`.** Discovered while testing (1) above: the pinned release's own
   HTTP transport dependency, `better-call`'s router, has an *unconditional*
   `console.error("# SERVER_ERROR: ", error)` fallback for any thrown value it does not recognize
   as one of Better Auth's own `APIError`s — this fires before Better Auth's `logger` option is
   ever consulted, so no `logger` configuration can reach it. `onAPIError.throw: true` closes that
   gap: Better Auth's own deliberate `APIError`s (wrong password, invalid origin, disabled sign-up,
   password out of bounds, ...) still resolve to their normal, correct HTTP response completely
   unaffected, but a genuinely unexpected failure (for example a database outage mid-request) now
   propagates out of `auth.handler()` instead of being caught and printed raw internally by
   `better-call`, reaching `handleAuthRequest`'s own try/catch and becoming a sanitized
   `IdentityRuntimeError` like any other unexpected failure — and nothing is logged at all.

Both apply in every environment, including under Vitest: neither is a `NODE_ENV=test` special case.
A focused unit test (`core/tests/identity-runtime.test.ts`) simulates a hostile log call (a raw
exception carrying a password, a host, a port, a filesystem path, and a rejected origin) and asserts
none of it reaches `console.error`, and separately asserts `onAPIError` is configured; a live
integration test forces a real identity-database failure through Better Auth's own sign-in handler
and asserts nothing at all reaches `console.error`/`warn`/`log` in the real process.

## Rate limiting

Better Auth's built-in rate limiting is always enabled, including by the executable entry point —
it is never disabled. Its built-in per-path rules (a strict default of 3 requests per 10 seconds on
sign-in/sign-up-prefixed paths) are preserved unmodified in production composition; only the
integration test suite injects a narrow, explicit override so it is not itself rate-limited by its
own many requests. Storage remains the default in-memory backend, which has two honest limitations:
it is **per-process** (no protection across multiple API instances or restarts), and because no
trusted-proxy IP policy is configured, Better Auth may fall back to a single shared bucket per path
rather than a genuine per-client bucket. This is not yet the final, distributed, production-grade
abuse-control design.

## Module permission discovery at startup

Before any database pool, Better Auth instance, or HTTP server exists, `startApi()` discovers
every installed module's manifest and composes the one immutable platform permission registry
(Core's own declarations plus every module's) that the rest of startup — and every subsequent
request — enforces against. A discovery or composition failure (an invalid manifest, a module
claiming the reserved `core.*` permission namespace, a duplicate permission declaration, ...) fails
startup outright, before there is anything to close; startup never falls back to a Core-only
registry. See [Authorization](authorization.md#api-startup-discovery-composition-and-enforcement)
for the full flow, and [Module development](module-development/README.md) for the manifest shape
that produces these declarations.

## Database connection limits

`apps/api/src/server.ts` configures the one shared PostgreSQL pool (`createApiDatabase`,
`apps/api/src/database.ts`, built on `createValidatedPostgresPool` from
`core/src/database/pool.ts`) with both a connection timeout and an operation timeout (10 seconds
each), the same bounded, validated pattern `core/src/migrations/postgres-database.ts` already
uses. `connectionTimeoutMillis` alone only bounds *establishing* a connection; it does nothing once
a query is already running on one. The operation timeout additionally sets `pg`'s `query_timeout`
and `statement_timeout`, so a hung or unexpectedly slow query is aborted rather than holding a pool
connection (and its caller) indefinitely. An invalid timeout (non-integer, zero, negative, or
larger than PostgreSQL's own maximum) is rejected as configuration error before any pool is
constructed, sanitized the same way an invalid connection string already is. Both the identity and
authorization domains read from this one pool through independent typed Drizzle views — see
[Authorization](authorization.md#shared-database-composition) for why there is exactly one pool,
not two.

## Graceful shutdown

`startApi()` (the composition function `apps/api/src/server.ts` exports, used by both the
executable entry point and tests) returns `{app, server, shutdown}`. `shutdown()` memoizes one
shared promise the first time it is called: every caller, concurrent or sequential, awaits the
exact same listener-drain-then-pool-close operation, and that operation runs exactly once no matter
how many times `shutdown()` is called. It stops the HTTP listener from accepting new connections and
lets in-flight requests finish, then closes the one shared PostgreSQL pool (identity and
authorization both read from it — see
[Authorization](authorization.md#shared-database-composition)). The executable entry point's
`SIGINT`/`SIGTERM` wiring is extracted into `installShutdownSignalHandlers(running, exit)` — the
same function production composition uses, but independently testable with a fake `running`/`exit`
so a test can trigger "a signal arrived" without sending a real process signal or invoking the real
`process.exit`. A startup failure after the database pool was already created (identity
construction failure, or the server failing to bind its listen address) always closes that pool
before the failure propagates.

## A real signup → sign-in → principal → sign-out transcript

Captured from this PR's own integration test against a real, migrated, disposable PostgreSQL
database. Session tokens, cookie values, and generated ids below are sanitized/truncated examples,
not real credentials.

```text
POST /api/auth/sign-up/email
{"email":"[email protected]","name":"Alice","password":"<redacted>"}
→ 200
{"token":null,"user":{"id":"2aKp4jPeV1QbXwyz1OH6IcAUfl2n1fc1","email":"[email protected]", ...}}

POST /api/auth/sign-in/email
{"email":"[email protected]","password":"<redacted>"}
→ 200
Set-Cookie: better-auth.session_token=<redacted>; Max-Age=604800; Path=/; HttpOnly; SameSite=Lax; Secure
{"redirect":false,"token":"<redacted>","user":{"id":"2aKp4jPeV1QbXwyz1OH6IcAUfl2n1fc1", ...}}

GET /api/v1/principal
Cookie: better-auth.session_token=<redacted>
→ 200
Cache-Control: no-store
{"kind":"authenticated","userId":"2aKp4jPeV1QbXwyz1OH6IcAUfl2n1fc1"}

POST /api/auth/sign-out
Cookie: better-auth.session_token=<redacted>
Origin: https://dashboard.example.test
→ 200
Set-Cookie: better-auth.session_token=; Max-Age=0; Path=/; HttpOnly; SameSite=Lax
{"success":true}

GET /api/v1/principal
Cookie: better-auth.session_token=<redacted, now revoked>
→ 200
{"kind":"anonymous"}
```

## Next phase

Phase 4C, pass 3: module discovery/Module SDK permission registration, roles/groups/teams/tenants,
an owner-management HTTP endpoint, service accounts/API tokens for non-browser automation, and
reversible relationship-derived access itself. See [Authorization](authorization.md) for what this
pass already added (permission registry, platform-owner bootstrap, explicit-grant HTTP API). Not a
Dashboard Surface, which still depends on an authorization model that is only now getting started.