flotilla/e2e/ARCHITECTURE.md

E2E architecture

Flotilla's end-to-end suite runs the real app against a relay network that is entirely under the test's control. Nothing in this directory opens a connection to a host the test did not create.

The relay

Every spec runs against a real zooid relay in Docker, the implementation Flotilla is built for, so protocol drift between the client's assumptions and a real relay shows up as a failing test.

zooid is multi-tenant: it binds a config to a Host header and serves any number of virtual relays from one process. harness/zooid/config.ts names them, one toml apiece in harness/zooid/docker/, and a scenario picks one by name. A second space costs a config file and no extra process, which is what keeps outbox routing and cross-space isolation testable.

A relay's policy is its toml and nothing else. A scenario says what is on a relay — its rooms, its members, its messages — never what the relay is, so there is no policy negotiation anywhere in the harness. space and other are the same permissive policy, for specs that need two relays; closed refuses a join that carries no invite claim, which is what raises "Request Access"; unsigned serves events with their signatures stripped, which is what raises "Do you trust this space?". Seeding a membership on closed is therefore not possible — join() and member() publish a claimless join and the relay refuses it — so a scenario there seeds admin-created rooms and lets the spec do the joining.

indexer and outbox are not spaces: groups are off, anyone may read and write, and nothing seeded on them carries an h tag. They are what "The follow graph" below is made of.

Why the relays are called <name>.test

The container listens on plaintext loopback, but a url that is local or insecure is dropped from every relay selection unless the caller opts in — see isLocalUrl and RelaySelection.getUrls in @welshman/util — and the app never opts in, since in production neither belongs in a routing decision. Handed ws://localhost:3334/, the client would load a space by its explicit url and resolve nothing else: no outbox loads for profiles or relay lists, no relay hints.

So the client is given wss://space.test/ and never learns the container has an address. Everything that speaks to it goes through zooid/transport.ts, which dials 127.0.0.1:3334 carrying the two headers a TLS terminator adds in front of a real deployment:

• Host: space.test — zooid's dispatcher binds a config to a Host (cmd/relay/main.go), so this is what selects which toml answers.
• X-Forwarded-Proto: https — khatru derives the url it checks NIP-42 and NIP-86 signatures against from Host plus this (getBaseURL in khatru/relay.go), arriving at wss://space.test/, which is exactly what the client signed into its relay tag. Seeding signs the same url, so a fixture is written over the same relay the app talks to.

.test is reserved by RFC 2606 and resolves nowhere, so a url that ever escapes this process fails to connect rather than reaching a host.

Transport: one interception point

All relay traffic is intercepted in the Node process via Playwright's routeWebSocket, applied to the BrowserContext so every page in it is covered:

browser context ──▶ context.routeWebSocket(everything but vite's hmr socket)
                          │
                          ▼
                  zooid.relays.get(url)
                          │
        ┌─────────────────┴─────────────────┐
        │                                   │
  a socket this process opens         unknown url: a relay that
  to the container, as that           holds no events, and the
  relay's virtual host                url is recorded as a leak

Every socket the browser opens is terminated in the node process, and the only one that leaves is the loopback connection zooid/transport.ts makes to the container the test started. assertNoLeaks() fails a test that touched a url the scenario never declared.

Because the branch is taken per socket rather than once, retention is expressible here too: forgetRelay(context, url) sends that context down the empty-relay side from its next connection on, without the url becoming a leak. A reload after it is a client coming back to a relay that has dropped what it was holding, which is what separates history a client kept from history it is reading back off the wire.

Interception is installed by as() and visit(), on a context each of them creates, so a page that came from anywhere else has none of it. Playwright's own context fixture — and the page fixture built on it — is therefore overridden to throw, so a spec written the ordinary way fails immediately with a message saying so rather than quietly dialling the relays in .env. The built-in request fixture goes the same way: an APIRequestContext is an http client in the node process that belongs to no browser context, so the block-all below cannot see it and nothing records what it sent.

playwright is the one fixture left alone, because it is where the run's own browser comes from, so every test would fail if it threw. A spec that goes around as() through playwright.request or playwright.chromium.launch() reaches the network unwatched, and no fixture can refuse that without refusing the suite.

Interception in Node rather than in the page enables multi-user testing. Three browser contexts logged in as three different users all dispatch into the same relay, so one user genuinely observes another user's writes, over the wire, through the client's real socket stack.

Why not an AdapterFactory

An AdapterFactory backed by a Repository-backed adapter cannot test authentication. NIP-42 lives on Socket: AuthState listens to SocketEvent.Receiving/ Sending, and socketPolicyAuthBuffer replays messages that were rejected with auth-required:. An AbstractAdapter whose sockets getter returns [] never constructs any of that. Patching the transport instead leaves Pool → Socket → SocketAdapter untouched, so auth, message buffering, replay-after-auth and reconnect are all exercised as written.

HTTP

Relays are not the only egress. installHttpRoutes routes every url that is not the dev server — a predicate rather than a "**/*" pattern, so the hundreds of module requests a sveltekit page makes in dev are never matched — and aborts what it catches. Two origins get past it: the dev server on localhost:1847, which is left unrouted, and each relay's own origin, which is forwarded to the container by the same transport carrying the same two headers, so the NIP-11 document and the NIP-86 management API the app reads are the real relay's answers, signed against the url the client used. Every other request is aborted and recorded.

A relay's NIP-11 document decides whether a space is synced by reconciliation or a plain REQ (NIP-77), whether a message the UI composes carries a protected - tag (NIP-70), what the space is called, and which pubkey room state is trusted from. Its NIP-86 answers decide whether the user is an admin, since a relay refuses management calls from anyone else and the method list that comes back doubles as the client's permission set — the space, room, event and pin menus, the directory and the library are all gated on it.

Services the app talks to are mocked per-scenario, so a blocked request is always a bug rather than ambient noise: Dufflepud (dufflepud.coracle.social), Blossom uploads, the push server (nps.flotilla.social), the hosting API, LiveKit token endpoints, and image/thumbnail fetches. The analytics script hard-coded in src/app.html is mocked with an empty body to avoid making assertNoBlockedRequests() a statement about the page shell rather than about the test.

Two of those answers are the scenario's own. NIP-11 fields a spec names are merged over the relay's real document — a redirect_to, a limitation, a NIP the relay does not implement — rather than replacing it, because self, pubkey and supported_nips are what room state is trusted from, and the merge is installed with the page, since the document is read at startup and cached from then on. The hosting API is a small stateful fake rather than fixed answers: a write mutates the record it names and the next read sees it, so editing a space, deactivating it or paying an invoice is observable. getHosting(context) changes the backend's mind between two of the user's clicks — a custom domain that verifies, an invoice that gets paid.

Containment

A browser has a fixed set of ways to put bytes on a wire.

how the app can reach the network	what stops it
WebSocket — @welshman/net's Socket, the only constructor call	context.routeWebSocket(url => !isDevServerUrl(url)). Terminated in node; an undeclared url gets a relay holding nothing and assertNoLeaks() fails the test
fetch / XMLHttpRequest — app code, welshman, @pomade/core	context.route(url => !isDevServerUrl(url)), which aborts unless a mock registered later answers first
img, script, link, fonts, media, and every other subresource	the same route. Images never reach it — mockImages answers anything with resourceType() === "image" with a 1×1 png
navigation, including the external links the ui offers	the same route: a document request is routed like any other, and a popup opens in the context that owns it
EventSource	the same route. Neither src nor welshman constructs one
navigator.sendBeacon	no call site. The one script that would use it is the plausible tag in src/app.html, served with an empty body
a service worker	serviceWorkers: "block" on the context. Playwright does not route a worker's requests, so the worker is refused instead
a web worker	no call site in src; @pomade/core's is argon2, which is cpu and no socket
Capacitor's native http and push plugins	not reachable from a browser, and the zooid config leaves [push] disabled so nothing is asked to register

Two connections leave this process, both to something the test started: the browser's to the vite dev server on localhost:1847, and zooid/transport.ts's to 127.0.0.1:3334. Everything else the app initiates dies in node.

The two ends are enforced differently. A websocket to a url no scenario declared is answered rather than refused — by a relay that EOSEs every REQ and accepts every event into the void — and the url is recorded, so the test fails on assertNoLeaks() naming it rather than on a timeout somewhere downstream. An http request nothing mocked is aborted outright, but noticing it is opt-in: assertNoBlockedRequests() is for a spec that has mocked what it exercises, because some of what a page asks for is meant to be refused.

Configuration is the other half. boot() overrides every VITE_ value that names a relay — default, indexer, search, messaging, signer, platform, blocked, the default space list — with the scenario's own urls, through the hook src/app/env.ts reads them with, and points VITE_PUSH_BRIDGE at ws://localhost:1/, which nothing serves, so a push bridge connection is reported as a leak rather than blending into a relay's traffic. The VITE_ values it does not override still name real hosts — the blossom server, the pomade signers, the thumbnail service, the push server, the hosting api — and none of them is contacted at boot. Blossom is read only when an upload starts, the thumbnail url only on android, pomade only when a signup uses it, and the hosting api and dufflepud are mocked. They are contained by the block-all rather than by configuration.

Grepping the repo for hostnames accounts for all of them, and there are only three kinds. Most are an href in help text — nostr.com, nostrapps.com, nsec.app, nosta.me, nostr.how, github.com, fountain.fm, cal.com, figma.com, coracle.tools, gitea.coracle.social, nwc.getalby.com, and the coracle.social entity links src/app/env.ts builds — reachable only by clicking, and routed if clicked. Two are fetched: dufflepud, whose origin is the one service url hard-coded rather than read from VITE_, and the plausible tag in src/app.html. Both are mocked. The rest are in comments. Under e2e the only hostnames are the four service origins net/http.ts matches on, the virtual relays' own .test names, and the loopback address zooid/transport.ts dials.

Three things this does not cover:

• WebRTC. livekit-client opens an RTCPeerConnection, and Playwright cannot see one. A voice or video room reaches its sfu over ice and dtls with nothing in between. mockLivekit decides where the client is pointed, which is why its serverUrl has to be something the test owns, and why [livekit] is omitted from the zooid config entirely. A spec that joins a call escapes this document's guarantee and needs its own answer.
• Playwright's own fixtures. context, page and request are overridden to throw, but playwright cannot be — it is where the browser comes from. A spec that reaches the network through playwright.request or playwright.chromium.launch() is unwatched.
• The browser itself. A browser's own traffic is not the app's and is not routed. Playwright launches chromium with --disable-background-networking, --disable-component-update and --disable-breakpad, which is the whole of the mitigation, and which is chromium's alone — E2E_BROWSER=firefox or webkit runs the suite under an engine those flags say nothing about.

Determinism without freezing the clock

Timestamps are never patched. Instead every fixture is generated fresh at the start of each test and signed with timestamps relative to the moment the test began:

const scenario = await seed(({relay, user, at}) => {
  const space = relay("space")
  space.room("general", {name: "General"})
  space.join(user.alice, "general")
  space.join(user.bob, "general")
  space.message(user.alice, "general", "morning all", at(2, HOUR))
  space.message(user.bob, "general", "morning!", at(90, MINUTE))
})

at(2, HOUR) is now() - int(2, HOUR) evaluated once per test, so "2 hours ago" renders the same way on every run without the app's now() being touched. Fixtures are published over a real socket, authenticated as the identity that signed them, so the relay stores exactly what it would have stored for a real client: there are no pre-signed JSON blobs to drift out of date, and a fixture the relay would have refused fails the test instead of appearing in a query.

Users and sessions

Test identities are deterministic secp256k1 keypairs derived from fixed secrets (alice, bob, carol, admin), so a pubkey is stable across runs and can be asserted on directly. makeTestUser(name) derives a fifth, sixth or hundredth one from its name and registers it, for the directory and search specs that need more people than there are named ones.

A logged-in user is created by injecting a NIP-01 session before the app boots. src/app/session.ts carries a DEV-only hook: restoreSession() prefers window.__TEST_SESSION__ when it is present, and window.__TEST_EVENTS__ becomes the repository contents a returning user's client would have found on disk. Both branches are stripped from production builds, and injecting through the hook avoids writing Capacitor's SecureStorage/Preferences localStorage encoding by hand.

The injected events go in after storage.ready. Storage loads what the last session left behind with Repository.load, which clears the repository before inserting, so anything put there while IndexedDB is still opening is wiped a few milliseconds later — before the layout has rendered anything, and long before authPolicy reads the room list to decide whether to answer a relay's AUTH challenge.

The cache exists for the harness rather than for the app. In production the client bootstraps itself: asking a keyed collection for a pubkey loads it, so authPolicy reading the user's room and relay lists to decide whether to answer a challenge is itself what fetches them, as is any outbox-routed load of the user's own data. Kind-10002 comes back from the public indexers, and syncRelayList cascades into the room list from there.

Here the indexers are the scenario's relays, because boot() points every relay list at them, and those are members-only — so that first load is refused with auth-required:, while authPolicy, conservative by default, will not sign for a url no list has named yet. Each waits on the other. The injected room list breaks the circle, and it is what a user who joined a space through the UI would have on disk anyway.

The price is that no spec exercises the bootstrap: every one of them starts already knowing which relays it belongs to, so a regression in the chain from relay list to room list, or in authPolicy's conservative gate, leaves the suite green. The public relays under "The follow graph" are the standing-in indexer that covering it would need.

Each user is a separate BrowserContext, which also gives each one its own IndexedDB and localStorage, so nothing bleeds between users.

An injected session is re-applied on every navigation, so through as() a reload, a logout and a login are all unobservable. visit(path, options) is the same page without one — same context, same interception, same env — and it is what a spec that watches someone arrive, sign in and come back starts from. Both take the same options, over and above the scenario's own relays:

option	what it does
context	merged over the project's context options: a viewport, a colour scheme, a permission
env	VITE_ values applied over the ones derived from the scenario's relays
nip07	a window.nostr backed by that identity's own signer, for an extension login
webln	a window.webln that answers the connection handshake, for connecting a wallet
relayInfo	fields merged over a relay's own NIP-11 document, keyed by relay url
hosting	what the hosting backend already knows about this user

Whatever env names still has to be something the scenario owns — a platform relay, the domain hosted spaces are created under — or the app dials a host nothing serves and the test fails on a leak. The NIP-07 provider is a real signer rather than a stub, because the session it produces has to sign the NIP-42 challenges the members-only relays send.

The follow graph

Everything /home's network column is made of sits outside a space: a follow list, each followed pubkey's relay list, and an indexer to resolve those from. open("indexer") and open("outbox") are the two public relays that hold it, and a scenario says which of them a given fixture lands on:

const scenario = await seed(({relay, open, user, at}) => {
  const space = relay("space")
  const indexer = open("indexer")
  const outbox = open("outbox")

  space.room("general", {name: "General"})
  space.join(user.alice, "general")

  indexer.relayList(user.alice, {
    read: [space.url, indexer.url],
    write: [space.url, indexer.url, outbox.url],
  })
  indexer.follows(user.alice, [user.bob])

  indexer.relayList(user.bob, {read: [outbox.url], write: [outbox.url]})
  outbox.profile(user.bob, {name: "Bob Barker"})
  outbox.note(user.bob, "the lighthouse has been dark since tuesday", at(30, MINUTE))
})

Bob is in none of alice's spaces, so the only thing that can put his note on her screen is his relay list. Keeping the indexer and the outbox apart is what makes that assertable: a client that ignored the list would ask the indexer, find nothing, and fail the spec, where one relay serving both roles would pass either way. VITE_INDEXER_RELAYS points at the indexer as soon as a scenario opens one, and at the scenario's spaces otherwise, which is what every spec written before there was one still gets.

An open relay's url reads before seeding has run, unlike a space's, because a relay list has to name the relay a note is seeded on.

Why a reader has to name the relays it reads from

zooid answers no REQ without NIP-42, whatever public_read says, and authPolicy is conservative: it identifies only to relays the user's own room list or relay list names. So a relay a spec expects the client to read from has to appear in that user's list, and a relay list is seeded for the reader as well as for the people they follow.

Read and write are separate there, and the difference is what a routing assertion hangs on. Above, alice writes to bob's relay and reads from her space and the indexer: the write url is enough for her client to identify to it, while a feed's context, which is built from her read urls, has no reason to ask it for anything. A reply that only lives on bob's relay therefore counts only if the feed asked the relay the note itself came from.

The write urls have a second job. A user's own follow list is loaded through their outbox, so the relay a scenario seeds that list on has to be one of the relays their list says they write to — the indexer, here. Seed it somewhere they only read from and the feed comes up empty with nothing to say why.

Her own relay list reaches her client as cache alongside her room list, for the same reason the room list does: it is the list that says which relays may be identified to, so it cannot be the thing that has to be fetched first.

Layout

e2e/
  ARCHITECTURE.md          this document
  harness/
    index.ts               everything a spec imports: `test`, `expect`, helpers
    keys.ts                deterministic keypairs
    ui.ts                  the locators specs share: dialogs, the composer, a room's messages
    files.ts               the bytes an upload spec picks, and the browser's own file chooser
    zooid/
      config.ts            the virtual relays and their hosts — the one place they are named
      relay.ts             docker lifecycle, reset, seeding over its own authenticated socket
      transport.ts         the only thing that knows the container's address: ws and http to it
      testRelay.ts         the seeding affordances a scenario builds on
      types.ts             TestRelay, RoomOptions, RelayConnection
      docker/
        compose.yaml       no data volume; tmpfs for /app/data and /app/media
        config/            one toml per virtual relay: its host, and its whole policy
    net/
      websocket.ts         routeWebSocket install, dispatch, transcript, leak detection
      http.ts              block-all + per-service mocks
    app/
      boot.ts              env overrides, navigate, wait for mount and for the app to have read
                           the overrides
      session.ts           NIP-01 session injection
      nip07.ts             a window.nostr backed by a test identity's own signer
      webln.ts             a window.webln that enables and reports what it supports
    seed/
      scenario.ts          the `seed()` builder and relative-time helpers
      publish.ts           the queue every seeding call goes through, and what it hands back
      space.ts             one space's fixtures: rooms, members, messages, replies, profiles,
                           direct messages, and anything a domain writer renders
      openRelay.ts         one public relay's fixtures: relay lists, follow lists, profiles, notes
  specs/
    *.spec.ts

A locator lives in the spec that uses it until a second spec needs the same one, at which point it moves to harness/ui.ts. The class or the aria label it names is then one edit when the app renames it, and the comment saying why it is shaped that way has one copy to keep true. What stays local is what one spec means differently: dms.spec.ts names a message by its data-event id, because the same words are sent more than once there.

One piece lives outside this directory: src/lib/test/session.ts holds the two window keys and the getters src/app/session.ts reads them through. It is the only file the app ships on the harness's behalf, and harness/app/session.ts duplicates the key names rather than importing them, since importing anything under src would pull sveltekit into the node process.

Resetting between tests

Zooid.reset() recreates the container rather than restarting it: with no volume mounted for /app/data, storage lives in the container's writable layer and a tmpfs, so a fresh container is a fresh database. What it mounts as its config is a copy of docker/config, staged outside the repo and refreshed on the way up — zooid saves a relay's toml back when a NIP-86 call edits its name — so every test starts against the same relays with nothing in them. The container is a worker fixture, so the docker start-up cost is paid once per worker rather than once per test.

Seeding then writes over a real authenticated socket, one per identity per relay, held open for the rest of the test. A fixture must therefore be signed by an identity harness/keys.ts holds, since zooid authenticates every write.

Anything richer than a room message is built by the domain writers the app itself publishes with: space.kind(Article) hands back the kind configured against this space, and space.event(user, () => …renderTemplate()) defers the render until the space has a url to render hints against, which is only true once the queue has drained. A NIP-17 conversation is space.dm(from, to, content): it gift-wraps one rumor per participant and publishes each wrap over the sender's connection, since a wrap is signed by an ephemeral key nobody here can authenticate as. zooid stores it anyway, because it authorizes a kind-1059 by the member named in its p tag — and refuses one addressed to a stranger.

Running

The suite is not run by agents (see CLAUDE.md).

pnpm exec playwright install                          # once
docker pull gitea.coracle.social/coracle/zooid:latest # once; the harness never pulls
pnpm test                                             # starts and stops the container itself

Every test skips when docker is unavailable, rather than failing.

One engine per run. These specs exercise sockets, auth and sync, so running them under three engines adds little coverage. E2E_BROWSER=webkit pnpm test runs the whole suite under another one. The container listens on a fixed port and cannot be sharded, so workers is 1.

src/app/env.ts resolves every VITE_ value through a DEV-only hook that prefers window.__TEST_ENV__, which boot() injects per browser context, so any dev server will do and a server already listening on :1847 is reused. boot() still checks that the app read the injected values, and fails naming the hook rather than letting a run drift onto the relays in .env.