wiki-security-author

⚠️ LOCAL USE ONLY — identity is asserted, not proven. Do not face the internet.

This security module trusts a plain JSON file on the local machine to say who you are. That is exactly right for a personal mirror farm on 127.0.0.1, and exactly wrong for anything reachable by anyone else.

Per-site authorization for a local mirror farm of public Federated Wiki sites — the offline-authoring half of a two-farm setup where real DNS normally serves the public domains remotely and a local farm serves the same page folders when you toggle offline.

Who you are comes from a local identity file (the machine is the login):

// ~/.wiki/local-author.json
{
  "name":  "David Bovill",     // provenance display name
  "id":    "david",            // matched against owner.json oauth2.id/username
  "admin": true,               // optional: edit every site, wiki admin
  "sites": ["david.*"]         // optional: extra editable-site globs
}

What it does

• Per-site authorization. A site is editable when identity.admin is set, when the site's status/owner.json oauth2 id/username equals identity.id, or when the domain matches one of the identity.sites globs. Everything else is readable, not writable. Unclaimed sites (no owner.json) are editable — fork-and-claim still works. No identity file → the whole farm is read-only.
• Provenance stamping. Every journal action saved through this server is stamped with "author": {"name": ..., "id": ...} — an additive field that travels with the page through sync and forks, so offline edits stay attributable after they reach the live site.
• Mirror cue. The client bundle marks every mirror-served wiki with a warm parchment background, an amber top stripe, and a small local mirror badge — so when /etc/hosts is diverting real domain names you always know you are looking at the local copy, not the live site.
• window.isLocalMirror flag. The client also sets window.isLocalMirror = true at script load — the machine-readable form of the same fact. Local-first plugins (e.g. wiki-plugin-terminal) use it to offer live behaviour on mirror-served public domains, where the hostname alone says nothing about being local. Live sites never serve this client, so the flag never appears there.

Install

npm install wiki-security-author   # in the wiki install (same node_modules as wiki-server)

Then start the farm with:

wiki --security_type author --farm --data ~/path/to/mirror

wiki-server resolves --security_type author to this package by name (wiki-security-author), the same convention as wiki-security-friends and wiki-security-passportjs.

Design note

This module is the strangler seam for future p2p / trust-graph security (Proof of Understanding, human.tech): replace the identity file with key material and the two authorization functions with attestation checks; nothing else in the wiki needs to change.

License

MIT