Queue-North-Website/docs/TOOLS.md

Tools — where the scripts are, and which ones can stop you

Status: Current
Owner: _null
Last reviewed: 2026-08-18
Governs: scripts/**, .githooks/**, package.json — the tooling, and which of
         it can stop you
Review trigger: Any script added to, removed from or repurposed in scripts/; any
                change to which of them gates; any change to the npm scripts

A signpost, deliberately. Every project that adopts this template has a docs/TOOLS.md, so "read docs/TOOLS.md first" is an instruction that works without knowing anything about the project — which is the whole reason this file exists at a fixed path.

The list is not here

architecture/README.md holds the table of what ships in scripts/ and what each one is. That is the one copy.

A second table here would be two records of one fact, and the other one would never hear that a script was renamed — the failure DOC_TRUST_MAP.md exists to prevent, applied to the tooling instead of the documents. So this file answers the questions that table does not, and points at it for everything else.

If this project has fewer scripts than the template lists

That is the intended state, not a broken copy. The template's scaffold.sh writes the documents and deliberately leaves the scripts behind — "an unconfigured release.sh landing in every new repository is a loaded gun, not a head start" — so they are taken one at a time, having been read.

This project took ten of them on 2026-08-18 and declined the rest. What it declined, and why, is in docs/history/DEVELOPMENT_LOG.md under that date. The short version: no release.sh or deploy.py until the roll-forward path to nebula is written down, and no controls.sh until there are backups for it to report on.

Which ones can stop you

Not in a table, because the honest answer lives in each script's own header and would go stale here. The rule that matters:

Exit code 2 is never a pass. These scripts distinguish "the check ran and found nothing" from "the check did not run", because those look identical from the outside and only one of them is evidence. A CI step or a hook that treats a 2 as success has quietly turned the check off. Each script states its codes at the top; read them there.

In this repository specifically, check-env.sh and verify.sh will both exit 2 if you gut their configuration, and preflight.sh exits 2 when the site is simply unreachable — which is the case you most want to tell apart from a pass.

The hooks are the other place work gets stopped. See below.

Where to start in a fresh clone

npm install
git config core.hooksPath .githooks     # per clone. Not optional. See below
bash scripts/check-env.sh --file .env   # what is configured, before anything reads it
bash scripts/secrets.sh --tracked       # what is already committed

Then architecture/GUARDS.md before you write a check of your own — how to write one that can actually fail.

The hooks

Four, in .githooks/, because .git/hooks is not versioned and a hook living there protects exactly one clone.

Hook	What it runs here
pre-commit	scripts/secrets.sh on the staged diff, then npm run build when source is staged
commit-msg	refuses a message with no conventional type
post-commit	pushes to origin
pre-push	refuses a push that leaves uncommitted or staged edits behind

pre-push is not the template's — it is the useful half of a hook that was already sitting in this checkout's .git/hooks before adoption. Setting core.hooksPath would have silently stopped that one running, which is exactly the failure this directory exists to prevent, so it was moved here instead. Its third check went: it refused whenever the branch was ahead of its remote, which is the precondition for pushing at all, so it fired on every real push and told you to re-run with --no-verify. A guard that can never pass teaches people to bypass the ones beside it.

git config core.hooksPath .githooks is per clone, so every checkout runs it once. An uninstalled hook fails silently, which is the same class of problem the hooks exist to prevent.

Two things worth knowing before you rely on them.

pre-commit is not the template's version. That one runs npx tsc --noEmit and npx vitest run; this project has neither TypeScript nor a test runner, so installing it unchanged would have refused every commit. It runs the secret scan — which is the reason the hook earns its place here at all, given the Zoho form tokens that reached four commits before anyone noticed — and then npm run build when src/, server/, index.html, vite.config.js or package.json is staged. That is a build, not a test. It catches a broken import and will not catch a broken behaviour.

post-commit pushes, and that is the intent — but it has a consequence worth holding on to: whatever documentation was not in that commit is now behind the code by one push. That is the mechanical reason docs/WORK_CYCLE.md asks for doc edits in the same commit rather than in a tidy-up afterwards. With this hook installed, "I will document it next commit" means the site has already published the version without it.

Escape hatches, both loud on purpose: SKIP_GUARDS=1 git commit … and SKIP_PUSH=1 git commit ….

This project's npm scripts

Run from the repository root.

Command	What it does
npm install	dependencies
npm run dev	Vite and the Express API together, via concurrently. Frontend on 5173, API on 3001
npm run build	three steps: the client bundle, then an SSR bundle from src/entry-server.jsx, then scripts/prerender.js, which writes static HTML for every route. This is the only real gate this project has
npm run build:client	the client bundle alone. Does not prerender — do not use it to produce a release
npm run preview	serve the built client
npm start / npm run server	the Express server alone, serving dist/
npm run docker:build / docker:run	build and run the image locally
npm run docker:compose:up / :down / :logs	the compose stack
npm run docker:push	build, tag and push queue-north-website:dev to the Forgejo registry
npm run docker:test	build the image and smoke-test it on 3001

There is no npm test, and that is not an omission in this table. There is no test runner in the project. docs/qa/ClaudeQACoverage.md carries it as a standing gap.

A liveness check by hand, when you want one without the script:

curl -s https://qn.isnull.dev/api/health     # {"status":"ok","db":"ok","timestamp":"…"}

Adding a script

Put it in scripts/, give it a header saying what it does and which incident motivated it, state its exit codes, and add a row to architecture/README.md's table — this file's Review trigger fires on exactly that.

The bar, from the scripts that are already here: done by hand three times, or once with a consequence. A script written before either of those has no failure to describe in its header, which is the part that stops the next person deleting it.