Project-Template/docs/architecture/README.md

Architecture

Status: Current
Owner: <who maintains this>
Last reviewed: <YYYY-MM-DD>
Governs: docs/architecture/**
Review trigger: Any new module, any change to a module boundary or a data shape

What belongs here

How the thing is built, for somebody who has to change it:

• Module boundaries — what each part owns, and what it is not allowed to know about. The boundaries are the architecture; everything else is detail.
• Data shapes — the structures that outlive a single function, especially anything persisted or sent over a wire.
• Reference manuals — the long documents that answer "how does X work" without requiring a full read of X.
• Decisions with consequences — why this database, why this concurrency model, why this dependency. Include the option that was rejected and what it would have cost, because that is the part nobody can reconstruct later.

Documents here

• GUARDS.md — how to write a check that actually checks. Read it before adding a structural test or a probe; every rule in it was learned from a guard that had been green over something broken.

What ships in this folder

Working code, not just prose. Copy what a project needs and delete the rest — these are a starting point with the arguments already made, not a framework.

This table is the one copy of that list. docs/TOOLS.md is the signpost every project is expected to have — it points here rather than repeating it, and answers the two questions this table does not: which scripts can stop you, and where to start in a fresh clone.

Path	What it is
scripts/release.sh	version bump, guards, build, verify, push, prune. Refuses to build on a half-run test suite or a malformed public origin.
scripts/verify.sh	the repo's own checks, in one command
scripts/check-env.sh	which variables are set, which are missing, before anything reads them
scripts/migrate.sh	apply and report migrations, including the ones that run outside a transaction
scripts/backup.sh	a dump that is verified before it is trusted
scripts/restore-check.sh	the other half of backup.sh: restores the newest dump into a scratch database it creates and drops, counts the tables, and times it — the number an incident actually needs. Never accepts a target, because naming one is the mistake --clean punishes.
scripts/healthcheck.sh	a liveness tick with the URL written down rather than re-derived each run
scripts/preflight.sh	the live-URL checks: headers, TLS, and (with --auth) login rate limiting and account enumeration. Refuses any host but its configured origin — two of its checks generate failed logins and look like an attack in somebody's log.
scripts/status.sh	what is deployed, and whether it matches this checkout
scripts/controls.sh	which operational controls this project actually has, each row saying how it is known: measured, declared, n/a, or unknown. An unknown is never rendered as absent — "I could not tell" and "it is not there" send people to different places.
scripts/dev.sh	bring the local stack up
scripts/scaffold.sh	lay out a new project in this shape
scripts/doc-triggers.py	which documents a pending change fires, read from their Governs: headers and narrowed by the optional Fires on: — the kinds of change (added, deleted, moved, changed) a document's trigger actually names, so one governing docs/** for existence changes alone does not fire on every edit. The Review trigger on each document names the change that should send somebody back to it; this is the check that asks before the commit rather than after
scripts/prove-guard.sh	breaks the thing a guard protects, requires the guard to go red, restores the file from a trap. GUARDS.md §1 written out as a command, including the count — one failing test reported on six lines is not six failures
scripts/commit-mine.sh	commits only the paths you name, by pathspec, after the secret scan. For a tree something else is also writing: what anyone else has staged is reported and left exactly as it was
scripts/doc-claims.sh	every file a document names must exist, and (--covers) every file that exists is named — the second is the one that catches a list missing rows
scripts/duplication.py	code that exists twice, tuned so what it reports is worth reading
scripts/dead-code.py	exports nothing imports, and assets nothing renders
scripts/secrets.sh	credential shapes in a staged diff, using the project's own patterns where it has them
scripts/audit-gate.mjs	high/critical advisories in production dependencies, with the allowlist npm does not have. An entry must say why the advisory cannot reach this app, what would make it reachable, and what retires the entry — three fields, so a waiver stays falsifiable. Exits 2 when nothing was checked.
scripts/forgejo-issue.py	file and close issues in the tracker convention, with every rule of it as a check
scripts/deploy.py	update the running stack to a published image. Publishing and deploying are separate; this is the second one. The only copy — it existed twice and drifted (#209); the privacyllc-deploy skill's is now a symlink to this file. Identity-free by design: it reads DEPLOY_IMAGE, DEPLOY_STACK_ID, DEPLOY_CONTAINER and DEPLOY_SITE_URL from the environment and refuses to run without them, so each project supplies its own via a wrapper. Never hard-code one here — least of all the site URL, which is frozen into the image at build time.
scripts/release-notes.mjs	tags the release and writes its notes, grouped by the commit types the message hook already enforces. Runs after release.sh has published, so a failure here cannot cost an image. Scrubs credential shapes out of commit subjects first — the body goes to a public repository.
githooks/	pre-commit, commit-msg, post-commit — see its README for the one install command

Every script takes its configuration from the environment and hard-codes nothing about any particular deployment. check-env.sh is the one to run first.

What does not belong here

• Product intent — that is docs/planning/PROJECT_PLAN.md
• What it should feel like — that is docs/design/
• What happened while building it — that is a history log, not architecture

A note on drift

Architecture docs go stale faster than any other kind, because code changes under them silently. This is exactly what the Review trigger line is for: name the change that should send somebody back here, and a reader can tell whether the trigger has fired.