wiki/CLAUDE.md

Wiki.js 3.x

Next-generation open source wiki. This is the 3.x development branch — incomplete, unstable, and with no upgrade path from 2.x. AGPL-3.0.

Nothing here has to stay compatible with an existing installation. Nobody is expected to be running an earlier state of this branch, so do not write migration shims, legacy-value fallbacks, deprecated aliases or "old data may still contain X" handling. Change the shape, change the callers, and delete the old path — a fallback for a case that cannot occur is dead code that still has to be read, tested and reasoned about. This applies to db columns, API payloads, stored settings and config keys alike; only real migrations under backend/db/migrations/ are exempt, because Drizzle needs the history to get a live dev database to the current schema.

Three independently-installed workspaces (each has its own package.json / node_modules, there is no root package or monorepo tooling):

Path	What it is
backend/	Fastify REST API server + job scheduler, Drizzle on PostgreSQL
frontend/	Vue 3 / Vite SPA, Tailwind CSS + an in-repo component library
blocks/	Lit web components users embed into wiki pages

Requires Node.js 26+ and PostgreSQL 16+. All three workspaces are ESM ("type": "module").

The backend is TypeScript 7; frontend/ and blocks/ are JavaScript. See TypeScript (backend).

Layout

Root

• config.yml — instance config (copy of config.sample.yml). Read by the backend at boot and by frontend/vite.config.js in dev mode to learn the proxy target port.
• assets/ — build output of the frontend (vite build writes here), plus static assets under assets/_assets/. Served by the backend. Don't hand-edit.
• dev/ — deployment/packaging artifacts: dev/build/Dockerfile (production image), dev/helm/, dev/packer/, dev/noto-emoji-build/.
• .devcontainer/ — VS Code dev container (app + postgres + pgAdmin + mailpit via docker-compose). Mailpit is the mail server for development: it accepts everything and delivers nothing, so a confirmation link or a password reset lands in a web inbox at http://localhost:8025 rather than a real mailbox. Point the wiki at it under Admin → Mail — host localhost, port 1025, TLS off, no credentials.
• localazy.json — translation sync config; locale strings live in backend/locales/.

backend/

Entry point is backend/index.ts, and it must be run from the repo root (node backend), not from inside backend/. It boots in three phases: preBoot() (config → db → models → cache → scheduler → event emitters), initHTTPServer() (Fastify plugins, auth, routes), postBoot() (refresh locales/strategies/sites from disk & db, start scheduler).

Started with --no-experimental-webstorage — by the npm scripts and by the production image's CMD, which is the only reason a bare node backend still opens with an experimental warning about localStorage. Nothing here uses Web Storage; lib0, under yjs, probes for it as it loads the way a library that runs in a browser too has to, and Node 26 answers that probe with a warning instead of a value unless --localstorage-file is given. Off, the global is absent and the probe takes its node path in silence.

• api/ — REST route plugins, one file per resource (sites.ts, users.ts, pages.ts, system.ts, locales.ts, authentication.ts), registered by api/index.ts under the /_api prefix.
  • api/schemas/ — shared JSON Schemas registered via app.addSchema() and referenced from route schemas as { $ref: 'Site#' }. Register new shared schemas in api/index.ts before the routes.
• controllers/ — non-API HTTP routes. site.ts serves per-site resources (logo, favicon, login background) under /_site; icons.ts serves icons under /_icons, implementing the part of the Iconify API protocol the frontend speaks (/_icons/<prefix>.json?icons=a,b and /_icons/<prefix>/<name>.svg). Public and cached hard — see Icons.
• core/ — long-lived singletons: config.ts (yml + db-backed settings), db.ts (pg pool, Drizzle instance, migrations, LISTEN/NOTIFY pubsub), logger.ts, scheduler.ts (poolifier thread pool + postgres-backed job queue).
• db/ — schema.ts (all Drizzle table definitions), relations.ts, migrations/ (generated).
• models/ — data-access classes over Drizzle, aggregated by models/index.ts and exposed as WIKI.models.*. Business logic belongs here, not in route handlers. types.ts holds the shared SystemIds passed to each model's init() during first-run seeding.
• modules/ — pluggable extensions, discovered from disk. Each module is a directory with a definition.yml (key, title, props/config schema) plus its implementation — e.g. modules/authentication/local/. modules/storage/* ships db and disk — see Storage targets.
• tasks/simple/ — jobs run in-process by the scheduler; each exports task(). File name is kebab-case, the task key is its camelCase form.
• tasks/workers/ — CPU-bound jobs run in a worker thread via worker.ts, which boots a minimal WIKI global (config + logger + lazy ensureDb()) and dynamically imports the task.
• base.yml — system defaults for every config key. Do not edit as a user-facing config; it defines the shape merged with config.yml and the db settings table.
• helpers/ — small pure utilities (common.ts, config.ts), plus storageFiles.ts, which is the file-tree half of the storage modules that address content by path (see Storage targets).
• types/ — ambient declarations: global.d.ts (the WIKI global) and fastify.d.ts (session + route-permission augmentations).
• locales/ — en.json source strings (Localazy-managed) + metadata.js language table (the one remaining JavaScript file; typed by its sibling metadata.d.ts).

frontend/

Vue 3 on plain Vite. src/main.js wires it up manually: router → pinia store → boot/* initializers → mount. There is no UI framework: src/components/shared/ is the component library (every component is W*, used in templates as <w-btn>, <w-input>, …), registered globally by boot/components.js and styled with Tailwind.

• src/boot/ — one-time app initializers: api.js (creates the ky client, exposed as the API_CLIENT global), components.js (global components), eventbus.js (EVENT_BUS global, mitt), externals.js, i18n.js, iconify.js (points Iconify at this instance's /_icons), monaco.js, temporal.js (conditionally polyfills Temporal, awaited before anything else in main.js).
• src/router/ — index.js (router factory) and routes.js (the full route table; page components are lazily imported).
• src/layouts/ — MainLayout, AdminLayout, AuthLayout, ProfileLayout.
• src/pages/ — route-level views. Admin*.vue are the admin area, Profile*.vue the user profile.
• src/components/ — everything else: dialogs (*Dialog.vue), full-screen overlays (*Overlay.vue), editors (Editor*.vue), nav/tree components.
• src/stores/ — Pinia stores (site, user, page, editor, admin, common, flags). stores/index.js creates the pinia instance and injects router into every store.
• src/renderers/ — page content rendering pipeline: markdown.js plus modules/ (katex, kroki, plantuml, markdown-it plugins).
• src/css/ — tailwind.css (theme tokens, utilities and the shared component classes) plus SCSS: _theme.scss (brand colours) and _palette.scss (the Material ramp the older stylesheets use). Both are injected into every SFC by css.preprocessorOptions.scss.additionalData in vite.config.js, which is why templates can write bare $primary / $grey-4.
• src/helpers/, src/assets/, public/, index.html.

Path alias @ → frontend/src (defined in vite.config.js; jsconfig.json mirrors it for the IDE).

Dev server runs on 3001 and proxies /_api, /_blocks, /_icons, /_site, /_thumb, /_user to the backend on 3000, so the backend must be running too.

blocks/

Self-contained Lit components. Each lives in blocks/block-<name>/component.js — the glob in rollup.config.mjs picks up any directory matching block-* automatically, so a new block needs no config change. Output goes to blocks/compiled/, which the backend serves statically under /_blocks/. Blocks are loaded dynamically at runtime, which is why _blocks/** is excluded from Vite's dynamicImportVarsOptions. A block pulling in a heavy library is fine — nothing is fetched until its tag turns up in a page — and a library that still ships CommonJS works too, since the rollup config runs @rollup/plugin-commonjs after resolve().

Blocks style themselves off :host and read the theme colors via CSS custom properties (var(--q-primary) — the --q- prefix is historical; the properties are declared in css/tailwind.css and rewritten at runtime for per-site theming).

Dark mode goes through blocks/shared/theme.js, never :host-context(). The app's source of truth is the body--dark class on <body>, which CSS in a shadow root cannot see; :host-context() is the selector for exactly that and is what every block used to use, but only Chromium ever shipped it — MDN has it deprecated, Firefox and Safari never implemented it, and there it silently never matches, so the block stayed light on a dark page. Instead construct a DarkMode controller (this._darkMode = new DarkMode(this)) in the block's constructor and write :host([dark]); the controller keeps that attribute in step, sharing one MutationObserver across every block on the page. A block that must act on the change rather than restyle for it passes onChange, or reads .isDark — block-diagram redraws mermaid in its own dark theme, block-map resolves a per-block theme prop that can pin a map light on a dark page.

Commands

Run backend commands from backend/, frontend from frontend/, blocks from blocks/.

# backend
npm run dev              # nodemon, restarts on any backend file change
npm run start            # plain node
npm run typecheck        # tsc — type check only, never emits
npm run typecheck:watch
npm run db-generate      # drizzle-kit generate — after editing db/schema.ts
npm run db-up            # drizzle-kit up

# frontend
npm run dev            # vite dev server on :3001 (needs backend running on :3000)
npm run build          # builds into ../assets — required before the backend can serve the UI

# blocks
npm run build          # rollup → blocks/compiled/

npx ncu -i (npm run ncu) for interactive dependency updates.

The API is browsable via Swagger UI at http://localhost:3000/_api in a running instance. Default admin login is admin@example.com / 12345678.

How far to go verifying a change

Match the check to the size of the change. npm run build, npx oxlint and npm run typecheck are seconds each and are the right check for nearly everything.

Do not stand up a throwaway instance and drive a headless browser to look at a small change. That means booting a backend against a scratch database, seeding it, and screenshotting through /usr/bin/chromium — a good ten minutes of setup that a moved border, a colour, a spacing tweak or a renamed label does not earn. Read the rule you wrote, trust the build, and say what you changed.

It is worth the setup for a new piece of UI whose markup has to meet a stylesheet written elsewhere, where being wrong means shipping something visibly broken — a component reusing existing content classes is the case that has actually gone wrong. Also for a flow with real state to exercise (a login, an upload, a save), where a screenshot answers a question reading cannot.

See the wikijs-isolated-test-instance memory for how to boot one when it IS warranted.

TypeScript (backend)

The backend is entirely TypeScript 7 (the native Go compiler — tsc is a platform binary, not a JS bundle). The only remaining .js is locales/metadata.js, which is Localazy-generated output and is typed by a sibling locales/metadata.d.ts.

There is no build step. Node 26 runs .ts files directly by stripping types at load time, so node backend and nodemon keep working unchanged as files are converted. tsc is used purely as a type checker (noEmit) — never to produce output. Do not add a build/dist step.

Consequences of type stripping, all enforced by backend/tsconfig.json:

• Relative imports must carry the real extension. A .ts file importing a converted module writes ./core/config.ts, not ./core/config.js and not extensionless — Node resolves the literal path. This means converting a file requires updating the specifier in every file that imports it. (allowImportingTsExtensions)
• Only erasable syntax is allowed — no enum, no namespace, no constructor parameter properties, no experimentalDecorators. Use union types or as const objects instead of enums. (erasableSyntaxOnly)
• Type-only imports must say import type, otherwise the import survives erasure and Node tries to load a value that doesn't exist. (verbatimModuleSyntax)

allowJs is off — the backend is fully TypeScript, so a stray .js file would silently escape type checking rather than be quietly tolerated. locales/metadata.js is the sole exception and is resolved through its sibling metadata.d.ts.

backend/types/global.d.ts declares the ambient WIKI global as the WikiGlobal interface, wired to the real module types (WIKI.db is the Drizzle instance, WIKI.models is models/index.ts, and so on). Only config and data stay any — both are assembled at runtime from YAML plus a JSONB settings table, so they have no static shape. index.ts and worker.ts build their own local WIKI literal and assert it to WikiGlobal, since each populates the object progressively.

backend/types/fastify.d.ts augments Fastify: session fields (authenticated, user, permissions) and the per-route config.permissions used by the preHandler permission hook.

Four dynamic paths are extension-sensitive and invisible to the type checker — they must be updated by hand if the files they point at are ever renamed:

• core/scheduler.ts → path.join(WIKI.SERVERPATH, 'worker.ts') (the poolifier pool entry)
• worker.ts → import('./tasks/workers/${kebabCase(job.task)}.ts')
• models/authentication.ts → import('../modules/authentication/${stg.module}/authentication.ts')
• models/storage.ts → import('../modules/storage/${key}/storage.ts'), plus the storage.ts presence check in hasImplementation() that gates it

scheduler.ts reads tasks/simple/ filenames with /\.[jt]s$/, so task files are extension-agnostic.

worker.ts builds its own minimal WIKI (config + logger + lazy ensureDb()), but the shared declaration types it as the full object — so worker-only code can reference members that do not actually exist in a worker thread. Be deliberate about what you touch there.

Conventions established during the conversion, worth following in new code:

• catch (err: any) at each site rather than globally disabling useUnknownInCatchVariables. Strict mode types a caught error as unknown, and this codebase reads err.message everywhere; annotating per-site keeps the looseness visible instead of hiding it in tsconfig.
• Per-route Fastify generics for request shapes: app.get<{ Params: { siteId: string } }>(...). The JSON Schema stays as-is for validation and OpenAPI; the generic is what types req.params, req.body and req.query.
• Pre-existing bugs are preserved, not fixed. Where the type checker exposed already-broken code, it was left behaving identically behind a narrow cast plus a FIXME: comment explaining the real fix. A migration should not silently change runtime behavior. Search FIXME: under backend/ for the list — they are genuine open bugs, not type-checker noise.

Conventions

Style, linting, formatting

oxlint for linting, oxfmt for formatting — not ESLint or Prettier (ESLint is explicitly disabled in .vscode/settings.json). Both are devDependencies of backend/ and frontend/.

npx oxlint            # from backend/ or frontend/ — uses that dir's .oxlintrc.json
npx oxfmt <paths>     # config is the repo-root .oxfmtrc.json

Format settings (root .oxfmtrc.json): no semicolons, single quotes, no trailing commas, bracketSameLine, LF, final newline. 2-space indent, per .editorconfig.

Otherwise follow standard JS rules. Note that much of frontend/ predates oxfmt and still uses the standard-style space before parens (function initializeRouter ()); new and touched code should be oxfmt-formatted, but don't reformat untouched files as drive-by changes.

Each workspace has its own .oxlintrc.json — the backend declares the WIKI global and node env; the frontend adds the vue plugin and the API_CLIENT / EVENT_BUS / Temporal globals. Only the correctness category is an error.

Both tools handle .ts with no extra configuration, and the backend's oxlint config already enables the typescript plugin. oxlint does not type-check — run npm run typecheck for that.

Never put two statements in a Vue template attribute. @click="doOne(); doTwo()" builds today and is a build error the moment the file is formatted, because semi: false and Vue disagree about the same character. Vue's transformOn decides whether an inline handler is a statement block or an expression from exp.content.includes(';') — with the semicolon it emits $event => { … }, without it $event => ( … ). oxfmt breaks the handler across lines and drops the semicolon, so Vue parenthesises two statements and the template fails to compile (Error parsing JavaScript expression: Unexpected token). Write a named handler instead — @click="closeAndRefresh" — as EditorMarkdown.vue and PageRelationDialog.vue do.

Neither side of that is worth reconfiguring, so don't try: the includes(';') check has no compiler option behind it, and the parse error is raised by the built-in transformExpression, which baseCompile runs before any nodeTransforms you could add — and Volar runs the same compiler, so a build-time workaround would still leave the editor showing errors. On the formatter side, embeddedLanguageFormatting: "off" does leave attribute expressions alone but also stops formatting every <script> and <style> block in every SFC. This is not an oxfmt quirk either: Prettier with --no-semi produces identical output. For a one-off where the inline form genuinely reads better, <!-- prettier-ignore --> on the preceding line works (oxfmt honors Prettier's marker; there is no oxfmt-ignore).

Utilities and dates

These apply to every workspace, frontend/ included — not just the backend.

• Use es-toolkit, not lodash-es. Installed in both backend/ and frontend/.
• Use the native Temporal API, not luxon. See Backend patterns for the Temporal gotchas worth knowing; they apply on the frontend too.
• luxon and lodash-es are being removed entirely. The migration is gradual: when you touch a file that imports either one, convert that file's usages as part of the same change — but don't sweep through untouched files as a drive-by. Once the last usage is gone, both dependencies get dropped.
• Prefer real es-toolkit subpath exports (es-toolkit/object, es-toolkit/array, es-toolkit/predicate) over es-toolkit/compat. Two lodash helpers are compat-only and have direct equivalents: defaultsDeep(source, defaults) → toMerged(defaults, source) (note the argument order flips) and toSafeInteger(x) → Number.parseInt(x, 10).
• On the frontend Temporal is a global, declared in .oxlintrc.json. src/boot/temporal.js dynamically imports temporal-polyfill for browsers without native support (Safari, as of mid-2026) and is awaited first in main.js. The polyfill is a lazy chunk (~21 kB gzipped) that browsers with native Temporal never download.

Permissions

There are two kinds of permission, granted separately and checked in different places. Which kind a name belongs to decides how it may be enforced, so it is the first thing to establish about any permission you touch.

Global permissions are held site-wide, bound to no path: access:admin, manage:users, manage:groups, manage:navigation, manage:theme, manage:sites, manage:system. That list is the whole of it — the one offered by the group editor (GroupEditOverlay.vue). They live on a group's permissions column, are flattened onto req.session.permissions at login (models/users.ts → updateSession), and are what the per-route config.permissions hook checks. manage:system bypasses every check everywhere.

Page rule permissions are bound to paths, and to locales and sites: read:pages, write:pages, review:pages, manage:pages, delete:pages, write:styles, write:scripts, read:source, read:history, read:assets, write:assets, manage:assets, read:comments, write:comments, manage:comments (PAGE_PERMISSIONS in api/pages.ts). A group grants them through rules: each rule names some of them (roles) plus how it addresses pages (match + path, or tags) and what it does with them (mode: ALLOW / DENY / FORCEALLOW). Nothing is granted by default, and when several rules match, the most specific one wins — helpers/pageRules.ts documents the ordering. Ask WIKI.models.groups.checkAccess(actor, permission, page), or mayOnPage(req, permission, page) in api/pages.ts.

Consequences worth knowing:

• A page permission cannot be enforced by config.permissions. That hook reads the group-wide list only, so permissions: ['write:pages'] refuses everybody. A route that turns on a page permission declares no route permission and checks in the handler instead — say so with a No route-level permissions: comment, as api/pages.ts, api/assets.ts and api/blocks.ts do.
• The two names are not interchangeable. manage:pages does not imply write:pages: a rule grants the exact strings in its roles.
• On the frontend, userStore.permissions is the global list (from users/whoami) and userStore.pagePermissions is what the session holds AT THE CURRENT PATH (from pages/userPermissions, refreshed per route in App.vue). userStore.can() ORs the two and treats manage:system as a wildcard, so it answers "may do this somewhere". Gate a control over the page in front of the reader on pagePermissions — that is what the endpoint behind the button will check.
• An anonymous request is the guests group, not an absence of groups: that is how a wiki opens reading, and suggesting edits, to the public. Deny guests explicitly where an account is genuinely required (reviewerFor in api/approvals.ts is the worked example).
• Never invent a permission name. Both lists above are closed; can('browse:fileman') and friends matched nothing and silently hid the controls they guarded.

Backend patterns

• The WIKI global. Set up in index.ts, typed in types/global.d.ts, available everywhere without importing: WIKI.db (Drizzle), WIKI.models.*, WIKI.config, WIKI.logger, WIKI.cache, WIKI.scheduler, WIKI.events.{inbound,outbound} (Emittery), WIKI.sites / WIKI.sitesMappings (cached site configs), WIKI.ROOTPATH, WIKI.SERVERPATH, WIKI.INSTANCE_ID.
• Routes are Fastify plugins: async function routes(app) { ... } with a default export.
• Permissions are declared per-route in config.permissions, and enforced by a single preHandler hook in index.ts. The array is OR-ed; a nested array is AND-ed (permissions: ['read:sites', ['manage:users', 'manage:groups']]). manage:system bypasses every check. @fastify/swagger's transform folds these into the OpenAPI description automatically — so declaring them is also how they get documented. Only global permissions belong here; see Permissions for the other kind and how they are checked.
• Every route needs a schema with summary, tags, and response schemas. hideUntagged is on, so an untagged route is invisible in the API docs. Reuse $ref schemas from api/schemas/.
• Errors via @fastify/sensible helpers (reply.notFound(), reply.badRequest(), reply.unauthorized(), reply.forbidden()). The setErrorHandler in index.ts shapes /_api/ failures into { ok, error, statusCode, message } JSON.
• Schema changes: edit db/schema.ts, then npm run db-generate and commit the generated migration. Never hand-edit an existing migration.
• A module prop marked sensitive is write-only. A route answering with a module's stored config runs it through maskSensitiveProps (helpers/common.ts) first, which replaces every non-empty sensitive value with SENSITIVE_MASK; the client posts the whole configuration back, and isSensitiveMask is what makes the mask mean "unchanged" rather than a new value. Masking belongs at the API boundary and nowhere earlier — the config the models hand out is what the modules read their credentials from. An empty value is never masked, so dots always mean something is stored, and clearing the field is how a stored secret is removed — except on a create, where there is nothing to keep and the mask leaves the prop unset. manage:system on the route is not a reason to skip this: the secret still ends up in a browser, a cache and a screen share. Both module-prop surfaces do it — storage targets (api/storage.ts) and authentication strategies (withoutSecrets in api/authentication.ts) — so a new one is expected to as well.
• Dates use the native Temporal API, not luxon (no longer a backend dependency). Temporal is a global in Node 26 and is typed by the TS 7 lib, so it needs no import. Four things to know:
  • Temporal.Instant accepts exact time units only — add({ days: 1 }) throws. Since these are all UTC instants, use { hours: 24 }.
  • Temporal types have no valueOf, so a < b throws. Compare with Temporal.Instant.compare(a, b).
  • Instant.toString() defaults to nanosecond precision; pass { smallestUnit: 'millisecond' } for values written to postgres or compared as strings, which is what the rest of the codebase emits.
  • Converting: date.toTemporalInstant() from a Date (what drizzle returns for timestamp columns), Temporal.Instant.from(str) for postgres-format strings (what raw db.execute() returns), and new Date(instant.epochMilliseconds) going back the other way.

Frontend patterns

• Templates are plain HTML. A handful of pre-3.x leftovers are still <template lang="pug"> — check the file you're editing rather than assuming.
• UI components come from components/shared/, registered globally, so <w-btn> / <w-input> / <w-icon> need no import. Each one is scoped to how this app actually uses it rather than to the full API of the framework component it replaced; the header comment in each file says where they differ. Add a prop there rather than reaching around it.
• HTTP calls go through the ky client, reachable as the API_CLIENT global (declared in the oxlint config, so no import needed) — e.g. await API_CLIENT.get('sites').json(). It handles the /_api prefix; authentication is the session cookie, sent with every request.
• Cross-component messaging uses the EVENT_BUS global (mitt).
• State lives in Pinia option stores. For utilities and dates use es-toolkit and Temporal — see Utilities and dates; the lodash-es and luxon still present in older files are on their way out.

Storage targets

A storage target is one module from modules/storage/<key>/ configured for one site. Six ship, each with a real storage.ts:

Key	What it is
db	Enabled on every site and impossible to turn off — bytes in the asset's own row
disk	The wiki's tree as files at <root>/<locale>/<folders…>/<file>
git	That same tree in a repository, committed per change and synced with a remote
s3	Amazon S3 and anything speaking its API — R2, Spaces, B2, Wasabi, MinIO
azure	Azure Blob Storage
gcs	Google Cloud Storage
sftp	That tree again, on a remote host over SSH — a copy, never a delivery source

A new module is a directory with a definition.yml and a storage.ts exporting the StorageModule contract, and hasImplementation gates both dispatch and the admin area's action buttons on the latter existing.

disk, git and sftp are the same tree in three places, and share helpers/storageFiles.ts for all of it: the layout, the front matter, what makes a file a page, and importTree's adoption walk. sftp hands importTree its own readFile — the only thing that differs about a tree on another machine — and uses path.posix throughout, since a wiki on Windows still talks to sshd in slashes. Its connection is cached per target and serialized, because a single ssh2-sftp-client does not support concurrent operations, and dropped on a connection-shaped failure so the next operation reconnects. Unlike 2.x's SFTP module it reads as well as writes, so a site can serve from it and import a tree that was put there from outside.

The three object stores are one file of client calls each. put, get, remove and copy — the ObjectStoreClient in helpers/storageObjects.ts — and objectStorageModule builds the whole StorageModule from them. An object key is a path, the same one disk would write, so a bucket and a folder hold a site's content laid out identically and pathPrefixFor decides the shape of both. Each of the three also takes a pathPrefix, which is the segments that key starts with — empty by default, so the tree sits at the root of the bucket, and set when the bucket has to be shared with something else, since an object store has no folders to keep two tenants apart. It is per target, unlike everything pathPrefixFor answers, for the same reason the bucket name is: which store the tree goes in and how the tree is laid out are different questions. It is normalized rather than validated — surrounding and doubled slashes go, and so do . and .. segments, which name a literal object in a bucket rather than a relative path. A custom baseUrl still stands in for the bucket and not for the prefix, because the key is signed prefix and all. Object stores have no rename, so moveObject copies and then deletes, in that order, and never deletes on a copy that failed. Credentials are optional on all three: left empty, each SDK falls back to the machine's own identity (an IAM role, a managed identity, a workload identity), which is how a deployment keeps a long-lived secret out of the database. Only exportAll is offered — there is no importAll, because nothing but the wiki writes into these buckets, which is exactly what makes git different.

Nothing else may live under modules/storage/. refreshFromDisk reads every directory there and expects a definition.yml in it; one without takes every storage module down with it, since the read is wrapped in a single try/catch that empties definitions. This is why the tree logic shared by disk and git — the front matter, the file name a page is filed under, what makes a file a page rather than an attachment, and the walk an import does — sits in helpers/storageFiles.ts instead.

Content is written to every target that claims it, and read from one. Those are two separate questions with two separate answers, and conflating them is the way to get this wrong:

• Written — a target's contentTypes.activeTypes says what is stored there, and a site may store the same kind in several places at once. An upload goes to all of them; the admin area's Targets tab is where that is set, per target.

• Read — assetDelivery.servedTypes names the content types a reader's request is answered from that target, at most one target per type across the site. The Content Delivery tab sets it, and a target may only be nominated for a type it also stores (validateTarget refuses the pair). Pages are never nominated: a page is read from its own row, always.

  Direct access. An object store can answer instead of being read through: assetDelivery.mode is streaming (the default — bytes through the wiki) or direct, where both serving routes (controllers/files.ts and the asset content API) answer 302 to a signed URL and the bytes never touch the server. storage.directAccessUrlFor is the whole decision and both routes call it. Three things it insists on: the target must be the nominated source for that content type (deliveryTargetsFor's head standing in as the database is not a nomination), the module must implement presignAsset, and the link's lifetime is capped at 7 days because no provider signs for longer. The redirect is cached for half the link's life, so a cached redirect can never outlive the URL in it.

  A signed link carries none of the wiki's page rules — it works for whoever holds it until it expires. That is what makes the store able to serve without asking the wiki, and it is why the expiry defaults to 5m. When signing fails, the site's storage.directAccessFallback decides: stream (default) serves the bytes the slow way so a bad credential costs performance rather than every image on every page, error fails the request so it cannot go unnoticed. The target records a warning either way.

  A custom baseUrl is signed for, never swapped in afterwards. S3 and GCS sign the host, so rewriting it invalidates the signature: S3 builds a second client (bucketEndpoint with the URL as the Bucket when the domain is the bucket, forcePathStyle when the bucket is a path segment), GCS passes cname, and Azure alone can simply swap the origin because a SAS signs the canonicalized resource and not the host. CloudFront is therefore out of scope — it needs its own key pair and signing scheme.

  A module can decline to serve at all. assetDelivery.isDeliverySupported (default true; false only for sftp) keeps a target out of the Content Delivery tab, out of sourceOptions, and gets a nomination refused by validateTarget and cleared by updateTarget. It is still written to, exported to and imported from — the point is that every image on every page should not be an SSH round trip. It does stay in the read fallback list, sorted behind even the database: offloadUnchecked can leave a file whose only copy is there, and a slow answer beats telling a reader it is gone.

  Only an explicit nomination moves delivery. A type nobody has been nominated for is served from the database (deliveryTargetsFor), never from whichever other target happens to be enabled — enabling one says where content is written, and a target enabled after an upload holds none of the existing files anyway. Disabling a target therefore puts delivery back, and updateTarget clears servedTypes as it goes so that re-enabling it later does not silently take the content type with it. The database gives the role up only by not holding the type at all.

So neither an asset nor a page records where its bytes went — there is no single place — and each target derives where its own copy sits from the tree, the same way for both. resolveTargetFor and assets.storageInfo are gone; writeTargetsFor and deliveryTargetsFor replace them.

Where a file sits under a target's root is one answer per site too, and storage.pathPrefixFor is the only thing that gives it: the leading segments of every path any path-based module writes, with parseStoredPath as its exact inverse for reading a folder back in. Two site settings shape it, both on the Configuration tab and both read through storage.pathLayoutFor:

• storage.sitePrefix (off) files the tree under a folder named after the site. Off because the configured root already is that site's folder; on is what lets two sites share a location, each ignoring the other's half of it.
• storage.localePrefix (on) brackets the tree by locale, which is what keeps guides/logo.png from being the same file in every locale. Off, the site stores its primary locale and no other — there is nowhere to put the rest — so pathPrefixFor answers null for them and the target is skipped: a page copy silently (the page is in the database either way), an asset copy after a canStore check, so that the upload still succeeds as long as some other target takes the bytes.

Neither setting moves anything already stored; the disk target's export and import actions are how content crosses from one layout to the next.

Which content type a file is, is one answer per site, not per target. large is a category of its own rather than a modifier — that is what lets a target take the 40 MB video without also taking every thumbnail — and the size at which it starts lives in the site's config as storage.largeThreshold (storage.largeThresholdFor, the admin area's Configuration tab). It has to be shared: a file the disk target called large and the database called an image would be claimed by neither target, or by both. The whole storage configuration of a site — the site-wide settings and every target — is read and written as one, through GET/PUT /sites/:siteId/storage.

Everything else follows from that:

• A write must succeed everywhere; a read may fall back. storage.putAsset fans out and throws if any target refuses, failing the upload — an asset may have no database copy, so a half-stored one must not be reported as saved. Refusing is not the same as having nowhere to put it: a target whose canStore says no is never asked, because nothing has gone wrong and the file may well be storable elsewhere. Only when nothing can hold it is the upload failed, and then with a CustomError — a plain Error reaches the client as a bare 500, since the error handler in index.ts only forwards a message that came with a statusCode. getAsset tries the nominated source and then every other target holding the content, database last, because a target enabled after an upload never received it. Pages are gentler still: mirrorPage / removePage / relocatePage log a target that could not keep up and carry on, since the database always has the page.
• The disk target's exportAll is a copy, not a move. It writes out everything it is configured to hold, overwriting, and touches neither the database nor any record — which is how content that predates the target being enabled gets onto it.
• The move is the database target's offloadUnchecked. Turning a target on only affects what is uploaded from then on, so a site that unticks a content type on the database is still carrying every file of that kind ever uploaded — and carrying it unreachably, since a target is only read for a type it stores. That action reads each of those out of its row, writes it to every enabled target holding the type, reads it back to check and only then clears the data column. An asset with no destination keeps its copy and is reported as stranded: nothing is cleared that is not known to be somewhere else, because this is the only copy of the bytes. Metadata is untouched throughout — data is the one column it empties.
• Renames have files to move on every target. assets.relocateAssets takes the old location from the caller and reads the new one off the tree; tree.renameFolder does the same for everything beneath a renamed folder, pages included (moved, not rewritten — nothing changed).
• Thumbnails always stay in the database (assets.preview) — the file manager asks for a screenful at a time, and a slow target must not cost a wiki its file browser.
• pages.adoptStoredPage and assets.adoptStoredFile are the way back in, for the disk target's two import actions. Both take an overwrite flag, and it is the only thing separating them: importAll leaves a path the wiki already has alone, because reconciling a file changed on both sides is a merge and belongs to a target with history, while importAllOverwrite lets the folder win — for a restore, where there is nothing to reconcile. A page is replaced through updatePage, so its previous version is in its history; an asset has none, and replace also dispatches the new bytes to every write target, since the copy a reader is served is usually the database's. Imported content is rendered with no script or style permission whoever ran the import, since the file need not have been written by them.
• On import a file is a page if its extension is reserved, or if it declares an editor in its front matter. A text page is front matter plus the source; a JSON page — a redirection today — is one JSON document with the metadata at its top level and the source under content.

Pages and assets share one folder, and the site's pageExtensions is what keeps them apart. A page is stored under its editor's extension (md, html, adoc, json), while the tree holds its name without one — so page notes/readme and an attachment called readme.md are different names to the wiki and the same file on disk. Three rules stop them ever meeting, and all three live in the models rather than in the storage module:

• pageExtensions are reserved. assets.upload refuses an attachment using one — a .md file is a page, so uploading it as an attachment is a mistake rather than a collision. This is the whole of it on a default site (md,html,txt).
• Both sides check anyway. For an extension a site has taken off that list, assets.guardAgainstPageCollision and pages.guardAgainstAssetCollision refuse whichever arrives second. Extensions must match to collide: readme.pdf sits happily beside the page readme.
• Nothing guesses at a name. StoragePageRef carries contentType, so a delete or a move touches exactly one file — a target that tried each extension in turn would delete the attachment next door.

A target's state column is how it is behaving, not how it is configured. { status: 'healthy' | 'warning' | 'error', message, updatedAt }, written only by storage.recordState as the model dispatches to a module, absent from StorageTargetInput, and reported by the Status card. error is a failure that was raised to whoever asked (a refused upload); warning is one that was swallowed because the request succeeded anyway (a page copy that could not be written). The last operation wins — a later success clears an earlier failure, which is what makes a full disk that gets emptied stop reporting itself without anybody dismissing anything. Nothing probes a target proactively, so a misconfigured one reads healthy until something is actually asked of it.

The git target is the disk target plus history and a remote. Same tree, same helpers, and then:

• Commits are local and immediate; the network is batched. A page save writes, commits and returns — prepareRepo deliberately never contacts a remote, so an unreachable one cannot make the wiki slow to edit or fail an upload. ensureRemote is the half that does, and only sync calls it.
• sync runs on a schedule. tasks/simple/sync-storage-targets.ts, on a * * * * * jobSchedule row seeded by jobs.init(), walks every enabled target whose module declares a sync handler (storage.syncableTargets) and runs it through executeAction, so a failure lands on the target's Status card. The Force Sync action is the same call on demand. In an HA set the scheduler hands the job to one instance, which is the one whose working copy syncs — each instance keeps its own.
• How often is storage.syncInterval, per site (the Configuration tab, syncIntervalFor, default 5m). Since it is per site, one cron row cannot express it: the tick is every minute — as fine as the shortest interval anyone can set — and the task skips the sites whose turn it is not. Due-ness is epochMinute % intervalMinutes === 0 rather than a stored last-sync time, so nothing has to be persisted, two instances agree without coordinating and a restart changes nothing. The cost is that a missed tick is not caught up, which for something running all day is the right trade. An interval that will not parse means never, not every minute.
• A pull is authoritative, and that includes deletions. What comes back is applied to the wiki with overwrite, and a commit that deleted a file deletes the page or asset here too. So push access to the remote is effectively write access to the wiki. Which of the two a vanished path was has to come off the tree rather than the file: the stem is looked up first and only counts as the page if pages.storageFileNameOf matches the name that went, so a deleted readme.pdf never takes the page readme with it.
• A conflict is settled, never left open. The pull is --rebase --autostash, and a rebase that conflicts stops and waits for a human that this working copy does not have — with the index unmerged, which git then refuses every write against, so it is not one failed sync but every commit after it (ensureRemote's checkout is the first thing to fail, and what such a target reports). pullRebase therefore rolls a conflicted rebase back and pulls again with -X ours, which during a rebase is the remote, consistent with a pull being authoritative. What -X cannot settle is a file one side changed and the other deleted; that fails the sync, but leaves the working copy usable. abortInterrupted also runs at the top of every sync and in prepareRepo, so a copy somebody left mid-rebase by hand heals itself instead of needing Purge.
• A working copy started again from nothing re-attaches itself. It is a directory in a container while the content is a database elsewhere, so an upgrade that replaces the container without a volume for data/repo takes it with it — and prepareRepo then inits an empty one, the next page save commits into it, and the wiki has the remote's own files under a second root commit. sync asks sharesHistoryWith before it pulls, and with no commit in common reattach merges the remote's history in with --allow-unrelated-histories -X ours instead: the remote's history and every file the wiki has not re-saved come back, the working copy's version wins where the two overlap (these files were written from the database since the copy was created, so the remote's copy is the older one), and the push that follows puts the two in step. It runs in every mode — a push mode force push from a working copy created ten minutes ago would otherwise replace the whole repository with it. The wiki itself is not written to and applyIncoming is skipped for that sync, since the diff is the entire repository; Import Everything is what takes in content the repository has and the wiki does not.
• The diff, not the tree. Incoming changes come from git diff --name-status -M -z between the commit the branch was on and the one it is on now — a sync runs every few minutes and cannot read every file each time. -z because a path may contain anything, newlines included.
• Every operation is serialized per target by withRepo: git locks its index for the length of a write, so two concurrent uploads would otherwise have one fail on index.lock.
• An empty commit is never made. Most page saves do not change the stored form of the page (a re-publish, a tag reordered into the same order), and commitPaths checks diff --cached before committing so the history says what actually changed.
• Operator git config is inherited on purpose — including commit.gpgsign, which will fail every commit if it is on without a usable key. The failure surfaces as the target's recorded error.

A change carries who made it, and only git cares. StorageAssetRef and StoragePageRef carry an optional actorId, which is the user id the models already had in hand at each dispatch site; storage.actorFor turns it into a name and an email, cached indefinitely because a page save is a hot path and a stale commit author costs nothing. Absent for a change no one person made — a folder rename that moved a hundred files, a scheduled sync — and the git target's configured default author stands in. A scheduled pull creates content, which needs an author, so it uses users.getSystemActorId(): the wiki's longest-standing active administrator.

Git's alwaysUseDefaultAuthor makes that stand-in universal, for a repository whose history must not carry the wiki's accounts. commitAuthor then returns the default without calling actorFor at all — not looked up and discarded, so there is nothing to leak by mistake. Note the committer is the default author in every case regardless: it is the repository's own user.name/user.email, which prepareRepo writes from those same two settings, and which is why they are in configFingerprint — renaming the default author has to re-prepare the repository to take effect.

Not to be confused with <dataPath>/cache/files, the serving cache in the assets model. That one is derived and swept; a storage target is where content actually lives.

Icons

Icons come from Iconify and are referenced the way Iconify references them — <prefix>:<name>, e.g. mdi:account-edit. That string is all that content, navigation items and page relations ever store; no SVG is ever written into content.

• Admin (AdminIcons.vue → /_api/icons) manages which sets exist: adding a set stores its metadata only, and enabling/disabling one controls whether its icons can be searched and filled in.
• models/icons.ts resolves a reference through four tiers — memory, disk (<dataPath>/cache/icons/<prefix>/<name>.json), the icons db table, then the Iconify API. Only the db is permanent; the disk cache is derived and starts empty on a fresh instance, so never treat it as storage. The upstream API is consulted only for an icon nobody has used yet, is capped per minute (public routes can trigger a fill), and is skipped entirely when offline is set.
• Serving is controllers/icons.ts under /_icons, cached for a year and immutable. Rendering a page never resolves an icon server-side.
• Frontend: render every icon with <w-icon :name> (components/shared/WIcon.vue). Components that take an icon prop go through it too, so every form works there.
  • Every Iconify reference written literally in this repo's source is inlined at build time by scripts/generate-icons.mjs into src/assets/icons.generated.js (committed) and drawn as an inline <svg>. Run npm run icons after adding or removing one; check-icons.mjs fails if the bundle drifts. This is why the interface needs no icon webfont — and why nothing an administrator does to icon sets can blank it, which fetching at runtime could not promise: resolution is gated on the set being enabled, and deleting a set drops every icon stored for it.
  • A reference built at runtime — an icon a user picked, stored on a page or nav item — is invisible to that scan and falls through to iconify-icon, resolving against /_icons as before. A name assembled by concatenation is therefore a bug: make it a literal.
  • img:… renders as an <img>. Legacy las la-cog / mdi-check webfont names are mapped onto their Iconify equivalents for data written before the fonts were dropped; do not write new ones.
• Picking an icon calls POST /_api/icons/materialize, which is what guarantees the wiki can serve it afterwards without the Iconify API.

GraphQL is being removed

An earlier iteration of 3.x used GraphQL/Apollo. All of it is deprecated — there is no GraphQL server left in backend/, and APOLLO_CLIENT is not defined as a global, so any call still going through it throws.

One call is left. pages/AdminNavigation.vue's save() sends the navigation tree and its mode through APOLLO_CLIENT.mutate, so saving the navigation is broken until it is ported. Nothing else under frontend/src/ references the global. That handler needs more than the endpoint, mind: it also calls this.$store.commit(...) nine times over, and the file is <script setup> with no Vuex store anywhere in the app — so this is undefined and every one of those throws too.

When touching it, port it to the REST API (API_CLIENT + the matching backend/api/ route) rather than extending the GraphQL code. If the REST endpoint doesn't exist yet, add it under backend/api/ following the schema + permissions conventions above — sites/:siteId/images/:kind, which replaced the logo and favicon upload mutations in AdminGeneral.vue, is a recent example of doing exactly that.