Two things the audit found, both about the archive path every shipped .app
uses.
**Settings could be wiped.** The update kept config/modules.json and
config/layouts/ by name, but not config/proddash.json — which holds the admin
PIN, the theme and the forge pointer. On an install whose data directory IS
the app's own config/ (an unwritable Application Support, or PRODDASH_DATA_DIR
aimed inside the app), an update wrote the repo's shipped defaults over it:
the theme went, and admin silently unlocked. Nothing inside the data
directory is written now, wherever it happens to sit, and the two legacy
names stay listed for an install whose state never moved out.
**A bad update was unrecoverable.** No rollback, and a fresh .app would not
help: seeding only replaces an *older* copy, and a broken one carries a
higher version — so the fix was deleting a folder nothing told you about.
Three changes, in the order they catch things:
- The download must parse before anything is swapped in. `node --check`
against the new server.js, and a failure is reported with the syntax error
and leaves the running copy untouched.
- Past that, the copy being replaced is set aside as `app.previous`, and
dropped once the new version has stayed up ninety seconds — so that folder
existing means "the last update has not proven itself yet", and never
anything older.
- The launcher, which already gives up after four stops in two minutes, now
looks for that folder before it does and puts the old copy back. Once: if
the old one will not run either, the update was not the problem.
The launcher half only reaches a machine with a new .app; the server half
travels by the normal update.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
