Files
shopdb-flask/docs/INDEX.md
cproudlock 534f179ee6 Make main the lean product a site receives
main was 16 days and 259 commits behind the line the product is actually built
on, at contract 0.30.0 against 0.35.0, with no per-PC credential code at all. It
was neither current nor curated - just stale. This brings it forward and, at the
same time, makes it mean something: main is what a receiving site installs, and
nothing else.

WHAT IT CARRIES. Twelve plugins - backups, computers, endpoints, guides,
knowledgebase, machines, network, notifications, printers, slides, tools,
warranty - plus applications, which is manifest-less core and always ships. The
only manifest dependency inside that set is endpoints on computers, and both are
in it, so the closure is self-contained.

WHAT IT DOES NOT. employees, geenforce, measuringtools, printedparts and usb
stay on the site line. So do the Windows installer tree, the VM rehearsal
helpers, the agent tooling config, one site's data loader, the internal audit
and findings records, and the planner spreadsheet. 1,135 tracked files against
1,438.

A REMOVAL THAT BREAKS THE APP IS NOT A REMOVAL, and two nearly shipped:

deploy/site-profile-universal.json still named all seventeen plugins. It is the
file docs/DEPLOY.md tells a site to provision from, so a fresh install would
have failed at `flask plugin apply-profile` with PluginError - the first thing a
receiving site does, broken by the branch meant to serve them. It now names the
twelve that exist, and its comment says the two must agree.

agent/ was never refreshed. Whoever populated this branch copied shopdb/,
plugins/, frontend/ and tests/ from the site line and left the agent tree at its
September state: 22 C# and PowerShell sources missing, including AgentCredentials,
EnrollmentService, AgentHttpFactory and the fleet-alert client, plus one file the
site line had deleted still present. The old tree is internally consistent, so it
compiles, and nothing in CI builds it - every gate was green over a server that
speaks enrollment and per-PC credentials to a bundled agent source that cannot.
Resynced whole.

DECISIONS THIS ENCODES, rather than defers:

- The plugin-authoring lab builds printedparts, whose manifest depends on
  employees, so it could not stay. The lab remains on the site line and main
  ships no build-along tutorial. That is a real loss for an adopting developer
  and is recorded here rather than discovered later.
- Recognition, Training and Recertification notifications are no longer seeded.
  Each splits one notification into a card per employee and renders a photo,
  which needs a plugin this branch does not bundle. Seeding them would offer an
  author a type that cannot resolve anybody. A site that installs employees gets
  them from that plugin's own seed.
- Windows/IIS is documented as the legacy path throughout, and the README leads
  with Docker, because that is what a receiving site gets.

The API description is regenerated for THIS branch - 347 paths and 483
operations, down from 415 and 573 - so the published contract describes what is
here rather than what the site line serves. docs/CONFIG.md lost the two
measuring-tool label keys the code no longer declares, which two lanes had
decided opposite ways.

Suite: 3124 passed, 6 skipped. Naming and style gates pass. The docs gates run
rather than skip, and every index line count is derived from the file it names.
2026-09-19 11:24:40 -04:00

12 KiB

Documentation index

Find the row that matches what you are about to do, read the pages in the "Read" column, and skip everything else. That is the whole intent: these docs are larger than any one person or agent can hold, so the only useful thing an index can do is tell you which few pages you actually need.

Lines is the total size of that row's page set. It is there so you can see the cost before you pay it. A one-page row is one page on purpose.

Derived, not authored. Every row comes from the docmeta block at the top of the page it names - its purpose, status and summary - and the page itself is the source of truth. So do not improve a row here: fix the docmeta on the page and bring the row into line with it. tests/test_docs_index.py fails when this file and the pages disagree, when a current page is reachable from no task row, when a row misstates what it costs to read, and when a link here or in START-HERE points at a file that is not there.

New to the project and not sure which row is yours: START-HERE is shorter and picks for you. An agent should read llms.txt first.

Tasks

Run a site

Docker is the topology this product line ships, and the only one. There is no Windows installer here and no IIS procedure to follow.

Task Read Lines
Stand up a new site on Docker at a connected facility DEPLOY 500
Stand up a site with no internet at all DEPLOY-AIRGAP 180
Build the image where npm cannot reach the registry DOCKER-PREBUILT-APPROACH 87
Try the product on a Windows box without building it DEV-BUILD-TEST 56
Upgrade a Docker or venv site to a newer version UPGRADE 150
Back up a site, or restore one BACKUP-RESTORE 202
Find a setting, an environment variable or its default CONFIG 356
Decide which plugins this site should carry PLUGINS 134
Answer whether this site is exposed to a published advisory DEPENDENCY-SECURITY 108
Hand somebody a password without leaving it in a chat SECURE-SEND 157

Fill a site with data

Task Read Lines
Load starting data from spreadsheets, with no developer CSV-IMPORT 139
Load starting data from a source database IMPORT-API + IMPORT-ADOPTION 379
Look up the import wire contract only IMPORT-API 283
Load the floor plans, or move every marker onto a redrawn plan FLOOR-MAP 137
Write a procedure technicians will follow on the floor GUIDES 237
File several devices that share one asset number ASSET-COMPOSITION 158

Shop-floor PCs

Task Read Lines
Understand what runs on a bay and which page to open next FLEET-ARCHITECTURE 144
Understand what the collector is before choosing a page COLLECTOR-INTEGRATION 85
Get the shipped reporters running on a fleet, and prove it COLLECTOR-CLIENT-SETUP + COLLECTOR-AUTH 439
Write a client that posts to the collector API COLLECTOR-PAYLOADS + COLLECTOR-AUTH 691
Decide how a PC authenticates - per-PC credential or shared key COLLECTOR-AUTH 292
Fix a bay showing the wrong slides EVENTSAVER 144
Install printers from ShopDB, or read the installer endpoints PRINTER-INSTALLER 140
Point the shop-floor tools at a different site's ShopDB ADOPTING-AT-ANOTHER-SITE 290
Explain why a host's backup is listed as stopped BACKUP-STALENESS 104

Build on the platform

Task Read Lines
Write and install a first plugin PLUGIN-QUICKSTART + PLUGIN-HOOKS 1059
Look up one hook, manifest field or shopdb.api import PLUGIN-HOOKS 866
Check a plugin against the conventions, and the traps that have bitten people PLUGIN-GUIDE + PLUGIN-HOOKS 1060
Ship a plugin from its own git repository PLUGIN-EXTERNAL-REPO + PLUGIN-HOOKS 1152
Choose how tightly to pin a sister site to the contract CONTRACT-STABILITY 149
Sign a plugin artifact, or make a site verify signatures PLUGIN-SIGNING 149
Add a backup kind to the backups plugin BACKUP-KINDS 52
Set up a dev environment and contribute a change back DEVELOPMENT-SETUP 390
Call the API: where the generated spec is, which surface owns what, how auth works API-REFERENCE 89
Look up current versions, plugin list or Alembic heads PROJECT-MAP 94
Find out what has shipped, and what is left before 1.0 ROADMAP 210
Find which architectural decision governs a question adr/README 69
Find the design record behind a shipped feature proposals/README 27

There is no build-along lab on this line. The five-part tutorial was written around a plugin this product does not carry, and a tutorial that walks a reader through a directory they do not have is worse than none. Learn the contract from PLUGIN-QUICKSTART and PLUGIN-HOOKS, scaffold with flask plugin scaffold, and read plugins/warranty/ - the smallest bundled plugin that owns tables, permissions, an asset panel and a dashboard card.

Looking for one endpoint? Do not look in a page. The generated spec is served at GET /api/docs on any running instance and tracked as docs/openapi.json; llms.txt is the short version - auth, the response envelope, and the recipes people get wrong. The API-REFERENCE row above is the pointer to both, plus the surface and auth orientation a spec cannot give.

Decisions

One ADR answers one question. Read the one row that matches and stop - nothing here is a prerequisite for anything else. adr/README is the authoritative ADR index and the only place that records whether a decision still holds; the lines below are the pages' own summaries, for routing.

Question it settles Read Lines
Why Asset, not the legacy Machine model, is the surface plugin authors may depend on ADR-001 200
How the plugin contract is versioned and what core_version a plugin must declare ADR-002 68
How a plugin reaches a site: bundled in-tree, or dropped into plugins/ from its own repo ADR-003 76
Why every site runs its own instance instead of one multi-tenant deployment ADR-004 100
How a plugin declares a collector schema so the framework wires the ingest endpoint and auth ADR-006 156
How the product is versioned and released, separately from the plugin contract ADR-007 123
Why each plugin owns its own Alembic chain instead of adding tables to the core chain ADR-008 131
Why the SPA gates plugin routes, so a disabled plugin URL redirects instead of breaking ADR-009 156
The hook contract a plugin uses to contribute UI without hand-editing core Vue files ADR-010 326
Why the equipment domain was renamed to machines and machinetypes became modeltypes ADR-011 75
How a site gets only the plugins it chose, and why curation plus signing is the security model ADR-013 435
Why a lean site stops creating database tables for plugins it never installed ADR-014 150
Where a site's own hostnames, paths and defaults are allowed to live, and where they are not ADR-015 156
Why the floor map became buildings and levels instead of one image with stacked floors ADR-017 151
Why metrology instruments are machines, so this product has no measuring-tool asset class ADR-018 132
Why every endpoint gets its own enrolled secret instead of one fleet-wide shared key ADR-019 217

Archive - do not follow these

Nothing below is current guidance and nothing above depends on it. A legacy page is still true but superseded: do not start new work from it. A historical page is a finished migration, a design proposal, or a decision about something this product line no longer carries, kept only as the record of why something looks the way it does.

They are listed so you can recognise one if you land on it, and so nobody has to read one to find out it does not apply. Together they are 1,799 lines that almost nobody needs.

Page Status What it is Lines
IMPORT-LEGACY-ASP historical Record of one classic-ASP shopdb migration: the fan-out routing, the judgement calls and what was left behind. 163
ADR-005 historical The split of machinery from metrology tools into two plugins. Superseded by ADR-018. 163
ADR-012 historical Why ShopDB owned GE-Enforce manifests as data. That plugin is not bundled here; ADR-013 and the API-token resource scopes trace back to this decision. 137
ADR-016 historical The plan for ShopDB-resolved credential targeting. Never built; superseded by ADR-019. 204
deployment/PRODUCTION-READINESS historical The 2026-09-07 assessment of why deployment was hard. Its gap list became the distributed-release item on the roadmap; its recommendation of Windows/IIS was reversed. 372
proposals/dashboard-live-fleet historical The case for a worst-first dashboard queue. Built; kept as the record of why. 179
proposals/device-identity historical One durable identity for the device a PC drives. Phase 1 is built; phases 2 and 3 are not started. 235
proposals/printer-assignment historical The design making printers a property of the machine. Shipped, and the shipped behaviour is in PRINTER-INSTALLER. 346

What the docmeta fields mean

Every page in docs/ opens with an HTML comment like this one, and this index is built from those blocks:

<!-- docmeta
purpose: howto
audience: operator
status: current
summary: One sentence saying what question this page answers.
loadwith: PAGE-A.md
-->
  • purpose - tutorial teaches by doing, howto is followed under pressure, reference is looked something up in, explanation says why.
  • audience - operator, adopter, developer, integrator.
  • status - current, legacy (true but superseded), historical (a record, not guidance).
  • summary - what this index shows instead of the page.
  • loadwith - the pages that page is not complete without. Usually none. Where a row above lists two pages, that is where the second one came from.