A member signing in has no idea what Gitea is, and for anyone this
platform is ever sold to it is a competitor's name on their login page.
Fourteen strings named it — a button, a logout page, an account-creation
notice and eleven error messages — plus Gitea's own sign-in and
authorize screens, which every member passes through.
Ours are reworded: "el servidor de cuentas" where the thing has to be
referred to at all, and nothing where it did not. Gitea's own screens
take APP_NAME plus the two footer switches, which are supported settings
rather than a patched template. APP_NAME goes in app.ini's unnamed root
section, spelled DEFAULT in the environment mapping, so the docs carry a
command to confirm it landed — a key written to a section that does not
exist is accepted in silence.
Comments, docstrings, column names and env vars keep the real name. The
code has to stay honest about what it talks to, none of it reaches a
browser, and renaming gitea_login would mean a migration for nothing.
Two guards added, since this is the kind of thing that creeps back one
error message at a time: no template renders the word outside a Jinja
comment, and no string literal outside a docstring contains it. Checked
against the previous commit, where they catch the one message that had
already been missed by hand.
Licence: MIT, no attribution-in-UI clause, and we redistribute nothing —
the official image runs unmodified with its own LICENSE intact. Gitea
ships the "powered by" switch itself. Reasoning recorded in §12.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
Two silent failures sitting between Phase A and a working invitation.
The compose file never passed MAIL_* through. Compose does not give a
container the contents of .env — it only substitutes into the compose
file — so the settings could be filled in correctly and read by nobody,
with the app reporting mail as unconfigured and the values sitting right
there on disk. test_deployment.py now fails the build whenever
.env.example and docker-compose.yml drift apart, which is how this
happened and how it would happen again.
The app's code is baked into the image (COPY apps /srv/apps), so a pull
followed by --force-recreate runs the old code and says nothing. Added
scripts/deploy-board.sh: rebuild, sync the compose file, restart, print
the log, and name any setting present in .env.example and missing from
the live .env. It never touches .env itself.
Also: "no mail server configured" is now told apart from "the mail
server refused". They want different things done about them, and the
first one sent an admin looking for an SMTP error that never existed.
The new-member form says so before it is filled in rather than after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
Until now an admin created an account, the password appeared once on screen,
and that was the only copy. Gitea's Forgot password answers "Account recovery
is disabled because no email is set up", because this server has never been
able to send mail. Every route a member had to a password of their own was
closed, which made the members area unusable by anyone not standing next to the
owner.
Now: the admin enters a username and an email, the server creates the Gitea
account with a random password nobody ever sees — the admin included — and the
member is emailed a link to a Viena Latina page where they choose their own.
The same mechanism gives "¿Olvidaste tu contraseña?" that works, replacing
Gitea's dead page. Nobody leaves the site for either, which is possible because
PATCH /admin/users/{username} accepts a password.
A link is enough to take an account, so it is treated as a credential: single
use, short-lived, stored only as a SHA-256, and invalidated when a newer one is
issued so an older email stops working. SHA-256 rather than a password hash
because these are 32 random bytes, not something a person chose — there is no
dictionary to slow down. Recovery answers identically for a known and an
unknown address, or the form becomes a way to enumerate members one address at
a time, and stops after three tries so it cannot be used to mail-bomb somebody
using this server's reputation.
Rejecting a password deliberately does not spend the token. A typo must not
lock somebody out of an account they have never reached.
If the mail fails the admin is shown the link instead. The account exists
either way, so the difference is between a delayed invitation and a person who
simply never gets in.
Found while testing: the rate limit did not work at all. created_at is written
by SQLite as "2026-09-25 15:00:00" and I compared it against Python's
"2026-09-25T15:00:00+00:00"; a space sorts before T, so every row looked older
than any threshold and the limit silently never fired. It is now compared
inside SQLite, where the format and the clock are the same one.
Also drops two tabs from the sign-in page: OpenID, which nobody here will use,
and Register, which contradicted DISABLE_REGISTRATION and invited people to try
something the server then refused.
Verified: 126 checks. Tokens are hashed at rest, work once, expire, die when
reissued, and are refused for a suspended member; a short password and a Gitea
rejection both leave the link usable; recovery is indistinguishable for known
and unknown addresses and stops at three; creating a member emails them and
shows no password; a failed send surfaces the link.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
Running without GITEA_ADMIN_TOKEN is the safer configuration and is documented
as such, but the member form did not know: it offered "Crear también su cuenta"
ticked by default and reported "Falta GITEA_ADMIN_TOKEN" only on submit, after
three fields had been filled in.
That is the shape of failure this project has lost the most time to — something
that cannot happen, going unsaid until someone has relied on it. The form now
reads the config when it renders and says so, with a link to Gitea's create-user
page.
The checkbox is disabled rather than hidden, because "you cannot do this here"
is more use than an option that quietly is not there. The refusal itself stays
in the handler: a disabled input is a courtesy, and a hand-crafted POST still
meets the same error.
Verified: 104 checks. The form states the limit with no token and is unchanged
with one, and submitting create_account anyway still creates no member.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
Everything on this site so far has been a file built from git. This is the
first component that runs code to answer a request and the first whose data
git does not hold, so the trade is stated in the README and the backup script
is not optional.
Roles are owner, admin and user. The owner is seeded once from BOARD_OWNER and
cannot be seeded again, because otherwise editing a compose file would be a
quieter way to take the top role than asking for it; ownership moves only by
transfer, inside the app. There is exactly one owner and a partial unique index
enforces it, so the invariant holds even when a handler is wrong. The owner is
beyond suspension and demotion by everyone, themselves included. Only the owner
makes admins; admins make users.
Sign-in goes through Gitea as a confidential OAuth client — the opposite of
Decap, which has to be public because it runs in the browser. The rule the
whole thing rests on is that a Gitea account is not a membership: entry needs
an active row in `members`, or every account on the instance is a member,
starting with the translations bot.
Admins can delete any post; nobody can edit anyone else's, admins included.
Taking a post down is visible to its author. Quietly rewriting it is not, and
an admin who could do that could leave a sentence attributed to someone who
never wrote it. The plan said admins could do both; this is the one place the
implementation departs from it.
Markdown renders with raw HTML disabled, which is the entire XSS defence and
the reason there is no sanitiser: the renderer emits only its own tags and
escapes the rest. The CSP carries no 'unsafe-inline', which makes an inline
onsubmit silently inert rather than broken, so the confirmation dialogs live in
a static file and a test fails any template that grows an inline handler.
GDPR is in scope rather than deferred: erasure removes the member row and moves
their authorship to a tombstone so the conversations around them still read,
and any member can download their own writing.
Verified: 63 checks pass, covering the membership gate, every role predicate, a
direct insert of a second owner being refused by the index, atomic ownership
transfer, CSRF, an offsite login redirect, script tags rendering as text, soft
deletes leaving both listings and exports, and the member screens rendering for
each role. Smoke-tested live: headers, both static assets, and the bare
/comunidad redirect that the Caddy matcher has to cover.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
